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THE STARS IN OUR EYES

Name: THE STARS IN OUR EYES
Author: Julie Klam
ISBN: 978-1-59463-136-8

THE FAMOUS, THE INFAMOUS, AND WHY WE CARE WAY TOO MUCH ABOUT THEM

by Julie Klam ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 18, 2017

Entertaining but shallow. Klam is perhaps too sensible a writer to care much about the filtered world of celebrities, and...

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A collection of essays on our culture’s fascination with celebrities.

Klam (Friendkeeping: A Field Guide to the People You Love, Hate, and Can't Live Without, 2012, etc.) has done her share of celebrity journalism in magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Glamour. In her fifth book, she chronicles her interviews with one-time or sort-of celebrities like Timothy Hutton, whose 15 minutes came when he won an Oscar in 1980 at age 20 for Ordinary People, and Griffin Dunne, who starred in An American Werewolf in London. They come across as perfectly pleasant, polite guys with little apparent interest in the subject of celebrity. The author professes a fascination with celebrities that began when she was a teenager plastering her bedroom walls with pages from Tiger Beat, but by this point, that fascination has clearly faded, and she seems to be proceeding dutifully through all the expected bases. She observes strangers taking selfies outside the restaurant where Seinfeld was filmed, speaks with Quentin Tarantino’s publicist, discusses the necessity of plastic surgery for celebrities, frets about the Kardashians and their unearned fame, and interviews former Mets player R.A. Dickey, forgetting to turn on her tape recorder, with a resulting chapter that’s more about her than him. The book is padded with dozens of recollections of celebrity sightings by Klam’s friends and acquaintances. In the book’s most pleasurable moments, the author discusses her Aunt Mattie, an unabashed reality TV show fan who enjoys sitting in her La-Z-Boy with her dog and some licorice and pretzels to watch and muse on the complicated relationships in Love & Hip-Hop: Hollywood.

Entertaining but shallow. Klam is perhaps too sensible a writer to care much about the filtered world of celebrities, and her fundamental indifference to the subject, no matter how she struggles to overcome it, makes the book seem less than essential.

Pub Date: July 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-59463-136-8

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
THE ALMOST LEGENDARY MORRIS SISTERS
by Julie Klam

- BOOK REVIEW
FRIENDKEEPING
by Julie Klam

- BOOK REVIEW
LOVE AT FIRST BARK
by Julie Klam

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.