A sweeping, revelatory dual biography.
Two icons and their turbulent times.
Contemporaries growing up in Weimar Berlin, Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) and Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) both aspired to careers in entertainment: Dietrich as a concert violinist, Riefenstahl as a dancer. In her engrossing, richly detailed debut book, Wieland, a historian of political theory at the Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Culture, offers parallel biographies of the two women, tracing their vastly divergent trajectories. Riefenstahl championed Nazis and exalted Hitler, while Dietrich left Germany for Hollywood stardom. When her future as a violinist was thwarted by tendinitis, Dietrich turned to acting, where her discipline and drive overcame her “modest gifts.” “I had no special talent and I knew it. Everyone knew it,” she confessed. Nevertheless, when Josef von Sternberg saw her in a revue, he decided he had found the star of his new project, The Blue Angel (1930). She would play Lola Lola, “a sassy, savvy, honky-tonk B-girl,” a role that launched her career. Wieland documents her affair with von Sternberg and her many subsequent lovers, including Erich Maria Remarque, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Jean Gabin, American Army Gen. James M. Gavin, Yul Brynner, Fritz Lang, and John F. Kennedy. She also had an intense, though platonic, friendship with Ernest Hemingway. A beloved entertainer of American troops, Dietrich later reinvented herself as a nightclub singer, but her career spiraled downward, and she often was beset by financial worries. Riefenstahl also diverted from dancing to acting, using her training in gymnastics and boxing for roles in mountain films, popular in prewar Germany. By the 1930s, she was not only acting, but producing, directing, and writing screenplays. Hitler, she learned, was a fan “and an anti-capitalist feminist to boot.” She was entranced. Egotistical and self-promoting but nevertheless talented, Riefenstahl won accolades in Germany; managed to be acquitted of Nazi collaboration; and reinvented herself as a photographer. Wieland deftly traces both lives through their many ups and downs.
A sweeping, revelatory dual biography.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-87140-336-0
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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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