More surface than substance.
In a gossipy tribute to romance’s irresistible lure, celebrity heiress Vanderbilt coyly recalls the many loves of her life.
Though Vanderbilt offers a psychological explanation for her constant quest for love, it seems more a perfunctory aside than a major revelation in this paean to the susceptible heart. Some of the material has been covered in her other work (A Mother’s Story, 1996, etc.): her happy but too-short marriage to Wyatt Cooper, who fathered her son, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, Wyatt’s early death, and the suicide of their other son Carter. Other sections are part of the public record concerning someone who’s been a headline-maker since childhood in the 1930s, when Aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney went to court claiming that Gloria’s mother was unfit (there were rumors of lesbian attachments) and won, becoming Gloria’s legal guardian. Her absent mother had a lasting impact, admits Vanderbilt: “The love of my life was my mother. My search for love has and always will be to revive the dream of . . . obtaining the perfect mother to love me unerringly and unceasingly.” And it is this search, always energetic, always optimistic, she now chronicles. The list of men in her life is long and often illustrious. They include husbands Pat DeCicco, Leopold Stokowski, and Sidney Lumet; Howard Hughes, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, and Roald Dahl (amusingly misspelled throughout as “Raoul”). Except for the one to Cooper, her marriages proved to be mistakes: DeCicco was abusive; Stokowski was cold and self-absorbed; Lumet wanted children and at the time she didn’t, being too busy with her acting career. Her lovers have also often disappointed, but Vanderbilt is still as dewy-eyed about romance as any dreamy adolescent, asserting that there’s always a chance of meeting someone who will transform her life and that dreams often do come true. They certainly have for Vanderbilt, more often than not.
More surface than substance.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-6480-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
