A brisk and often funny style and a talent for catching his subjects off-guard with unexpected questions make for...
Two decades of celebrity profiles for Esquire, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and other magazines.
Celebrity worship is a two-sided thing. The media delight in making celebrities into larger-than-life figures, but it finds as much, if not more, enjoyment in cutting them down to size, demonstrating that for all their fabulousness, stars are just as prone to selfishness, irresponsibility, or stupidity as anyone else—though admittedly on a bigger scale than the rest of us. People in search of major dirt may find Zehme’s subtitle somewhat misleading, for while many of his profiles are undeniably comic, few major indiscretions are detailed. Indeed, for the most part, the author takes an affectionate, even protective attitude toward his subjects, though it’s couched in a breezily irreverent style that deflects any charges of outright sycophancy. He may poke gentle fun (carefully noting the length of the pauses in his interview with the notoriously evasive Warren Beatty, for instance), but on the whole he’s sympathetic. Thus we find Hugh Hefner sounding like a moony teenager as he searches for a new “special lady” after his divorce; Woody Allen—his own indiscretions by then a matter of public record—bemoaning his court-ordered estrangement from his and Mia Farrow’s children; Madonna dodging paparazzi in the wake of her breakup with Sean Penn; and so on. One of the few occasions when Zehme becomes genuinely critical is in a series of articles on the behind-the-scenes scheming that resulted in Jay Leno rather than David Letterman inheriting The Tonight Show from Johnny Carson, but even there he assigns the blame primarily to Leno’s agent and the suits at NBC.
A brisk and often funny style and a talent for catching his subjects off-guard with unexpected questions make for interesting glimpses of the real people behind their public personae.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-33374-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Delta
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
