Like a good detective, Lambert manages to uncover the salient clues to personality, creativity, and enduring friendship—in a...
An ambitious biography of the well-respected British film and theater director, told by his close friend Lambert (Nazimova, 1997, etc.).
A hybrid of intimate reminiscence, scholarly analysis, psychobiography, and cultural history of gay life in the world of film and theater from WWII to the present, Lambert’s biography largely dispenses with any pretense of impartiality. Drawing upon the diaries Anderson kept throughout his life, the author (who met Anderson while they were both teenagers) interweaves his reminiscences of their shared past with a retrospective reading of Anderson’s private thoughts during the same periods. There emerges a Janus-faced portrait of Anderson, outwardly at home in the world and inwardly disgusted with himself and everyone around him. The prism for this journey is the sexuality of the protagonists, for both Lambert (gay, out early, and unrepentant) and Anderson (gay, closeted, and miserable) lived at a time when their homosexuality could have landed them in prison. The author adeptly traces their collaboration on the influential 1950s film magazine Sequence (famed for its scathing indictment of the British film industry), as well as the fits and starts of their careers in the arts—Lambert writing commercials and Anderson directing the documentaries O Dreamland and Thursday’s Children (where he cut his teeth before moving on to such features as If..., O Lucky Man, and The Whales of August). Despite great distances (the author lived in Los Angeles and Tangier while Anderson remained in England), the two men correspond all their lives, working with some of the most important actors and filmmakers of the century (including John Ford, Luis Buñuel, John Gielgud, and Nicholas Ray).
Like a good detective, Lambert manages to uncover the salient clues to personality, creativity, and enduring friendship—in a business not known for long alliances. (55 b&w photos)Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-44598-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
