A perceptive, though dark, portrait.
An unsparing look at the abrasive performer.
Cultural critic Siegel (Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, 2008, etc.), winner of the National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism, contributes to the Jewish Lives series with a biography of the misogynist, disdainful Julius Henry Marx, nicknamed Groucho because of his “sour, bitter nature.” Siegel argues that Groucho’s stage persona was consistent with his real personality: “Groucho embodies the spirit of nihilism,” the author asserts, “yet his biographers and various commentators always try to impart some positive or affirmative quality to him.” He finds the sources of that nihilism in his early life: the middle son of five brothers, he had a “marginal position in his parents’ household.” The most intellectual of his siblings, he wanted to become a physician. Instead, his mother yanked him out of grade school and sent him out to work to earn money for the impoverished family. His father was weak-willed, his mother domineering, and the young boy, “wounded by his mother,” became a performer “whose aggression toward women is at the forefront of every film.” Siegel analyzes—and sometimes overanalyzes—the Marx Brothers’ movies, identifying instances of Groucho’s “abuse and invective” to show how his routines “on stage and screen were seamless with the rhythms of his temperament as he passed through everyday life.” In keeping with this series’ focus on Jewish identity, Siegel examines Marx’s connection to his cultural heritage. He concludes that his comedy “has deep roots in Jewish forms of irony and social dissent,” disdain for authority, and sense of displacement and ostracism that resulted in “explicit contempt for other people.” The man who emerges from these pages is difficult, unlikable, and brash, and his humor coarse. Siegel identifies Lenny Bruce as his heir rather than Woody Allen, with whom he is sometimes compared.
A perceptive, though dark, portrait.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-300-17445-8
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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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