Life with Barbra, when she was Barbara, from the former boyfriend who helped set her on the road to fame and fortune. Though Streisand has tended to slight the efforts of those who shaped her early career, she has all but ignored actor and scriptwriter Dennen. However, playing Henry Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle, it was Dennen, apparently, who encouraged her to pursue singing when she was focused exclusively on acting, who pushed her to audition, who urged her to treat songs like compact dramas, who taped and critiqued almost every performance. In short, he did everything except teach her to sing. When they first met, brought together in a forgettable play, Streisand was still in her teens and Dennen not much older. Both of them were desperately, and usually unsuccessfully, pursuing the lights of Broadway. It was one of those meetings that create show-biz history. She brought raw, unburnished talent; he brought an unrivaled knowledge of show tunes and great chanteuses backed by a huge record collection, and he had a high-quality tape recorder. Although Dennen had doubts about his heterosexuality, the two soon became lovers. It lasted a little more than a year, falling apart just as Streisand's career really began to take off. Streisand fans will find much of this story familiar, but they will surely be delighted with the details and insights Dennen provides. He is a graceful writer, though his camp sensibility can border on clichÇ; despite some frank, even harsh appraisals, he sometimes swoons vapidly: ``If you met St. Peter at heaven's gate and he asked you what good you had done . . . I would say, `I helped give the world Barbra Streisand.' '' A full and rare look at Streisand before she disappeared into a fog of myth and publicity. (14 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1997
ISBN: 1-57392-160-2
Page Count: 281
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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
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
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