The author of Five for Hollywood (1991) comes up with a galloping, hard-breathing bio of Beatty that recycles the gossip about his love life against the plots of his films. Parker here offers a wavering image that may well resemble Warren Beatty. Unlike close buddy Jack Nicholson (also the subject of a Parker bio), Beatty never sits for Rolling Stone profiles—and it wouldn't matter if he did, since all his interviews are masterpieces of smokespeak in which he absorbs questions like a black hole, taking in matter but giving off no light. His first major Hollywood romance, Joan Collins, however, has much to say, though largely through Parker's rehashes of her autobiography, Past Imperfect. A seeming interview with early Beatty lover Leslie Caron also sounds suspiciously literary: ``[Method acting] happened as with the Impressionists who all have a common denominator in their painting...This school of acting was first created by Stanislavski, director of the Moscow Arts Theatre''—and so on. Parker takes us through all the headline affairs: with Natalie Wood (separated from husband Robert Wagner), Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, Michelle Phillips, Madonna, and Annette Bening, his wife and mother of his only child. Though Beatty's performances were always interesting and based in a discriminating choice of roles, he had to overcome a longstanding pretty-boy image to win critical favor by starring in and directing and/or producing Bonnie and Clyde (which rose above a bad press to become a smash hit), Shampoo, Heaven Can Wait, Reds—for which he won a directing Oscar—Dick Tracy, and Bugsy, among others. No sensational revelations here: just the glitz behind the tinsel.
Pub Date: April 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-7867-0072-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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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