A behind-the-scenes glimpse at parties where the famous mingle with the famous.
A chronicle of a close friendship that might seem unlikely on the surface.
Early on, Simon (Boys in the Trees, 2015) writes that “no one is more interested in famous people than other famous people,” so perhaps the most avid readership for this thin memoir will be famous people who want to read about famous people writing about even more famous people. Simon and Jackie (no last name necessary) would seem to inhabit different circles of fame, but here they seem equally at home in each other’s worlds. The author and her subject were neighbors on Martha’s Vineyard, and they worked together during Jackie’s publishing career on a series of children’s books. Yet what really brought them together was the friendship each had with director Mike Nichols. “Almost every woman I met during the 1980s was besotted with him….I’m not exaggerating when I say that Mike was the preliminary conduit to Jackie’s and my friendship,” writes the author, as she dishes on just how much and how often Nichols would turn the tables and ask her about Jackie. Little wonder, then, that there was a coolness between the woman he married, Diane Sawyer, and the women who thought about marrying him—or settled for something less permanent. Jackie asked Simon to sing at her daughter’s wedding, the two went out to the movies together (they avoided Oliver Stone’s notorious JFK), and Jackie warned Simon about marrying her second husband, who turned out to be gay. The author suggests that some might find the two of them to be an odd couple and that she risks “ridicule or denouncement” in writing such a book. But there’s a full-circle irony in how Jackie had long tried to persuade Simon to write a memoir; now she is the subject of her second.
A behind-the-scenes glimpse at parties where the famous mingle with the famous.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-27772-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
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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