The indefatigably prolific Meyers (Bogart: A Life in Hollywood, 1997, etc.) continues to work his way through the major icons of American film. Gary Cooper didn’t set out to be an actor. Given a choice, he would have preferred to be a painter in the mold of the great western artist Charles Russell. But he was born into the roles in which he became best known, a lanky, laconic westerner, son of English parents living in Montana, raised on a ranch but educated (albeit briefly) in England. He fell into film acting more or less by accident, taking extra and stunt work while living with his family in Hollywood in the mid-1920s, replacing a missing actor on a silent western and revealing an affinity for the camera. His rise was stunningly fast, so much so that in 1931 he suffered a nervous breakdown. When he returned after a few months— rest, he became bigger than ever. What is forgotten about Cooper is that his best work was not in westerns (or his equally famous pair of Frank Capra films, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Meet John Doe) but, rather, in the more rarified world of romantic comedy, particularly in an unlikely but highly successful series of collaborations with the urbane Ernst Lubitsch (Design for Living, Desire), Howard Hawks (Ball of Fire) and Billy Wilder (Love in the Afternoon), and romantic dramas like A Farewell to Arms. Meyers seems more interested in recounting Coop’s numerous sexual conquests—his tempestuous affair with Lupe Velez, his several marriages and various dalliances—than in the films, and his critical judgment is unexceptional. Frankly, he has little of interest to say about the films, and when he attempts to generalize (as in a lengthy peroration on the role of the 1929 version of The Virginian in shaping the film western), his statements are riddled with clichÇs and inaccuracies. The book’s lifeless prose suggests great haste and no small lack of interest. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-15494-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
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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