A touching, textured, and compellingly written slice of the iconic actress’s life.
Marilyn Monroe’s whirlwind engagement with New York City receives a fitting reflection.
Using a wealth of interviews, key documents, and ongoing correspondence, Winder’s (Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953, 2013) illuminating chronicle of Monroe’s relocation to Manhattan centers on the actress in 1953 as she became increasingly restless and eager to abandon her “lonely life” in Hollywood, always powered by “cliques, connections, and friends of friends.” In an effort to regain control over her career and allow disputed contract terms with Fox to simmer, Monroe secretly relocated and, together with photographer Milton Greene, formed a production company on the East Coast and began taking method acting classes in Manhattan with Lee Strasberg. She spent much of her New York time cultivating Marilyn Monroe Productions, fraternizing with the likes of Truman Capote, Marlon Brando, and Arthur Miller, and revitalizing her public image. However, as Winder notes, for Greene, keeping track of her became an immeasurably daunting task. Personally and professionally blossoming with the blockbuster success of The Seven Year Itch (1955), Monroe focused on making her company profitable, but insecurity became her biggest nemesis after returning to foster her career with Fox in Los Angeles, a city where she was “a milkmaid among Malibu tans.” With a storybook cadence and impressive description, Winder writes of this time in Monroe’s erratic life as an empowering, fulfilling episode, an opportunity to spread her creative wings amid a caged life fraught with the kind of grueling career pressures and studio demands that necessitated medicating herself to relieve chronic insomnia. Asks the author, “who was this warm-blooded space creature who lugged around dictionaries, spoke like a drugged-up puppy, and looked like a French pastry?” Winder doesn’t pretend to unravel the many mysteries of Monroe, but she respectfully and quite thoughtfully salutes her East Coast tenure as she reveled for an instant in the sparkling possibilities of life in the Big Apple.
A touching, textured, and compellingly written slice of the iconic actress’s life.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-06496-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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