A hit.
A moving, absorbing journal of life on stage and at home.
A young (early 30s) veteran of stage (Rent) and screen (Adventures in Babysitting; A Beautiful Mind; the upcoming film adaptation of Rent), Rapp here makes an impressive debut as a writer, bringing a keen actor’s sense of detail, timing and pathos to the page. He opens with vivid descriptions of auditions, workshops and early performances of the musical Rent, with which he had become involved as an actor soon after its inception. His production log gaining momentum, he shifts abruptly yet skillfully to home in Joliet, Ill., where doctors discover a malignant tumor growing on his mother’s adrenal gland. Narratives entwine as Rapp reveals how his mother’s heartbreaking demise, his work in a major musical hit and his turbulent relationships with four men eventually, if painfully, empower his acting and enrich his life. Rapp sharply brings to life a series of inherently dramatic moments. There are the tumultuous performances of Rent, especially the one given for the parents and friends of Rent’s composer Jonathan Larson after Larson dies on the eve of the show’s explosive success. There are accounts of romantic yet tortured personal relationships. But most notably, there is the story of Rapp’s relationship with his mother. Clearly, mother and son had forged a bond after the mother divorced and as her son found work as a young actor. Still, their relationship remained tendentious, especially over the issue of Rapp’s homosexuality. Flying home on days off from Rent, Rapp eventually establishes touching rapport with his gravely ill mother. Writing with painful sensitivity of a final, wrenching farewell as he confronts her lifeless body, he reaches a deep, affecting level of personal expression.
A hit.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-6976-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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