Barber’s "automatic bullshit detector" has served her well and makes for a winning book.
The veteran celebrity journalist looks back on her legendary ability for asking questions others wouldn't dare.
Barber (An Education, 2010, etc.) believes being "exceptionally nosy" is part of what has made her so successful as a journalist. "I want to understand other people,” she writes, “I want to know what they think, what they do when I'm not there, how they interact, especially with their families, and how they got to be how they are." The author’s astringent manner and desire to cut through the typical PR fluff and draw her subjects out have made her many celebrity profiles—as well as her memoir—worth reading. Barber is equally frank discussing her working-class upbringing (that and her bookish nature made her stand apart from her well-heeled schoolmates) and seven-year apprenticeship at Penthouse magazine, after which she moved on to Vanity Fair, Observer, Sunday Times and others. Rather than common folk, she has interviewed celebrities and artists whom she admires "for their talent, but even more for the courage it takes to become a star, to leave the cosy camaraderie of the herd." The author complains that actors are the most difficult to interview and that athletes "never seem to have anything interesting to say.” For example, she regards her 2011 interview with tennis champion Rafael Nadal (reprinted here, along with several others)—during which his handler told him what to say—as making “a silk purse out of a sow's ear." Footnotes are definitely in order, as Barber's British references will puzzle American readers who won't have a clue what "I don't want to sound pi about it" means or think making coffee in a "Smeg-filled kitchen" sounds unsanitary.
Barber’s "automatic bullshit detector" has served her well and makes for a winning book.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4088-3719-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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