A thorough but often graceless narrative of a life that might better have remained shrouded in mystery. Paris (Louise Brooks, 1989) has classic material to work with. Teenage Greta Gustafson is discovered in Stockholm by director Mauritz Stiller, who tyrannizes her, changes her name, makes her a star, and accompanies her to Hollywood. Stiller's career stalls, and he dies a failure. Meanwhile Garbo becomes the familiar icon that her roles frequently mirrored: the perpetually exhausted, gloomy, misunderstood woman with the mesmerizing face. During the period of her stardom and for the 49 years that followed her inadvertent retirement in 1941, Garbo cultivated her pathological, and paradoxical, loathing of publicity and wariness of strangers. This seems to have served not only as a means of self-protection; it was also wise publicity strategy, for she comes off in the reminiscences of her friends and colleagues as paranoid, incurious, and self-absorbed. Paris tellingly repeats Cecil Beaton's observation that ``if she hadn't been `Garbo,' nobody would've wanted to be around her for ten minutes.'' Paris had access to 100 hours of recorded phone conversations between Garbo and art dealer and confidant Sam Green from the 1970s and '80s that portray Garbo as swamped in her own banality, refusing to speak of her films but always ready to complain about her wrinkles, her diet, and her disgust at being recognized in the street. Paris is particularly skillful when detailing Garbo's abortive attempts at a comeback, but the chronology of his anecdotes is sometimes scrambled, and he offers dubious psychosexual insights in his effort to defend an improbably chaste portrait of her: ``Garbo's own innocence was as real as it appeared onscreen, and it was a quality that had to do with love, not sex.'' The prose is often marred by similarly tortuous analyses. Although it leaves her motivations enigmatic, this will likely be the definitive Garbo biography; unfortunately, the story of her life is far less captivating than her screen legacy. (180 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-394-58020-6
Page Count: 634
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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