At times fascinating, the interviews offer a casual, unguarded look at some of the most high-profile personalities of the...
A career-spanning collection of the writer’s celebrity interviews.
Since 1987, George Wayne, or GW, has picked the brains of pop-culture luminaries for readers of his DIY magazine R.O.M.E., Interview, and Vanity Fair, where his column appeared for 22 years. Collected in this volume for the first time, the interviews offer unique insight into a particular New York social circle populated by the glitterati, fashionistas, celebrities, and other socialites. Having landed in New York in the early 1980s after graduating from the University of Georgia, Wayne immediately immersed himself in downtown clubs, and his predilection for fashion designers and celebrities reflects the exclusivity and stratification of that scene. (References to air-kisses abound.) The “Q&As,” as the author calls them, are conversational and irreverent, and Wayne never shies away from asking controversial, occasionally random questions. He asks Joan Rivers about her fondness for plastic surgery, 90-year-old architect Philip Johnson about Viagra, and on which date David Copperfield first slept with supermodel girlfriend Claudia Schiffer, among other non sequiturs. Updated with contemporary introductions, not all of Wayne’s interviews seem slated for posterity. His fawning adoration of “alpha fox” Ivanka Trump and the assurance that she would “keep POTUS 45 [her father, Donald Trump] grounded and real” is already terribly dated. Other interviewees include model Kate Moss, Donatella Versace, Carrie Fisher, Marc Jacobs, Barry White, Kathleen Turner, Farrah Fawcett, Tony Curtis, Charlton Heston, Martha Stewart, and Russell Simmons. Featuring a foreword by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter (who says Wayne reminds us “that we could all use a bit more mischief in our lives before the age of the individual passes us by for good”), Wayne’s collected interviews are playful snapshots of the rarefied world of celebrity shoulder-rubbing.
At times fascinating, the interviews offer a casual, unguarded look at some of the most high-profile personalities of the past 30 years.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-238007-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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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