Engrossing, lucid presentation of a uniquely complicated and productive life.
The tumultuous story of a director whose signature movies—dark, bleakly funny, shot through with perversity and paranoia—reflect the sensibility of an artist shaped by circumstances more harrowing, unpredictable and absurd than any Hollywood melodrama.
Roman Polanski’s troubles began in 1939, when the Nazis invaded his native Poland. The family was confined to Krakow’s Jewish ghetto, and in 1943 his parents were sent to concentration camps, leaving their ten-year-old son to fend for himself. (After the war, reunited with his father, he learned that his pregnant mother had been gassed at Auschwitz.) Cunning and possessed of a ferocious drive, Polanski eventually attended film school in Lodz, where he quickly became the star pupil and developed a reputation for lavish spending, partying and prodigious sexual conquests. In slyly playful prose, Sandford (McCartney, 2007, etc.) limns the young artist as a mercurial changeling, alternately arrogant, tender, hilarious, boorish and charming, always striving for (and coming thrillingly close to) technical perfection in his cinematic technique. After he emigrated to America, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown helped define a new era in movies and cemented their director’s status as one of the greats. Polanski’s personal life remained gothic: In 1969 his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was horrifically murdered by the Manson Family; eight years later, the director pled guilty to the charge of “unlawful intercourse” with a 13-year-old girl, fled the country before sentencing and has lived in Europe since. Sandford admirably extracts all of the salient information from the maelstrom of controversy and urban myth surrounding Polanski’s often lurid personal history, neither damning nor exonerating him. When he won the Academy Award for Best Director in 2002 for his Holocaust drama The Pianist (obviously, he could not attend), the driven, 69-year-old director was in Paris, preparing his next film.
Engrossing, lucid presentation of a uniquely complicated and productive life.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-230-60778-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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