A glamorously bittersweet showbiz memoir.
Award-winning actress Bergen continues the story begun in the best-selling memoir, Knock Wood (1984).
This second installment of the author’s autobiography focuses on the three great loves of her life: her two husbands and her daughter. When she met her first husband, French director Louis Malle (1932-1995), “[s]parks decidedly did not fly.” Less than a year after their first awkward introduction, however, the two were married. The showbiz woman who “dealt strictly in commerce” was soon immersed in a world of elegance and high art alongside a dynamic man she affectionately calls a “cultural commando.” During the early years of her marriage, Bergen struggled with ambivalence over whether or not to have a family. At age 39, she gave birth to a daughter, Chloe, who would in time become even closer to Bergen than the globe-trotting Malle. Her stalled acting career took off shortly afterward when she was chosen to play the lead in the iconic TV series Murphy Brown. By the early 1990s, the show would inspire a “family values” controversy for its fearless portrayal of a hard-driving career woman who becomes an unwed mother. Bergen admits that the success strained relations with her husband. At the same time, it also helped her to carve out her professional identity as a comedian while giving her the “weight” and “self-definition” she needed to define the boundaries of home and family. Her golden life ground to a temporary halt when Malle was diagnosed with a rare and fatal brain disease. Within three years of his death, however, Bergen met her next husband, billionaire New York real estate developer Marshall Rose. More settled than the peripatetic Malle, Rose not only offered the actress entree among the New York City social elite, he also brought her the next great challenge of her life: learning how to appreciate a life genuinely lived in tandem.
A glamorously bittersweet showbiz memoir.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-684-80827-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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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