An engaging and amiable autobiography by the veteran, Academy Awardwinning character actor. Though they labor in the shadows of stars, supporting players are frequently more talented than their top-billed brethren, whose fame and fortune are so often the gift of their looks. Supporting players like Malden have only sheer acting ability going for them. Born Mladen Sekulovich, in 1913, into the Serbian enclave of the dreary mill town of Gary, Ind., Malden seemed destined for a life of hard manual labor. In school he acted frequently, but he had little sense of where or how to take this talent further, so he went to work in the local steel mill. Sensing life slipping by, he eventually visited the Goodman drama school in Chicago. With his small savings, he could only afford one semester's tuition, but he soon earned a scholarship and was on his way. Malden debuted during the Golden Age of American drama, when Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller were at the height of their powers. After he'd struggled for several years in plays that quickly closed, his portrayal of Mitch—on both stage and screen—in A Streetcar Named Desire launched his career of semi-stardom. This was the era of the Group Theater, that dedicated, even cultic, band of performers and directors who changed American acting. While Malden was deeply involved with them, he already, naturally, adhered to many of their precepts—minus their dogma. His comments on his preparation as an actor are some of the most interesting parts of this book. Despite his acting abilities, Malden has no great gift for choosing roles, and beyond a few notable exceptions, such as Patton and On the Waterfront, he has appeared in any number of mediocre movies and TV shows. Still, his is an inspiring story of perseverance and hard work. As autobiographies by second bananas go, this is among the best of the bunch.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-84309-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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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