Entertaining memoir from a not-so-innocent abroad.
After a nine-day stint in Iraq, London Times correspondent Ayres (War Reporting for Cowards, 2005) finds himself embedded in Los Angeles.
Taking up residence at “the Leisureplex,” aka the Park Wellington apartments, just a block off the Sunset Strip, the author gradually learned the rules of his new environment, from valet parking (“I thought I was being carjacked”) to nightclub protocols (“getting into places like the Whiskey Bar is a lot easier when you’re with a good-looking girl in tight jeans”). He soon succumbed to the affluence and decadence he was sent to cover. Barely able to make rent, he found himself in the “Desperate Period.” A new plasma TV seemed to be the cure, but his deepening financial stresses caused an attack of acute acne: “Not the harmless, splat-your-bathroom-mirror variety, but the infected, biological-warfare-victim variety.” Despite this handicap, he was able to enchant women with embellishments about his “tour” in Iraq, getting in over his head after enticing supermodel Courage Macleod. In vignette after glib vignette, Ayres casts about in a sea of paparazzi, nightclubs, dermatologists and dissipation, never getting more than skin-deep into his subject matter. Of course, detailing Hollywood’s skin-deep lifestyle could be the entire point of this book. With a morsel of truth that summarizes the whole of his baptism by fire, the author attends a party and proclaims, “These days in Hollywood, parties aren't social occasions, they’re marketing opportunities. They’re all about the spectacle of extreme consumption, designed to encourage the rest of us to follow suit.”
Entertaining memoir from a not-so-innocent abroad.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1881-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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