A close, unblinking look at a bright star with some internal darkness.
A veteran biographer of pop-culture icons (Cary Grant, Walt Disney, Clint Eastwood) returns with an account of the astonishing film career of Marion Robert Morrison (1907-1979).
Eliot (Nicholson: A Biography, 2013, etc.) dispenses with much one might expect in a thick biography—e.g., interviews with those who knew Wayne, sordid sexual details (the author does show us an actor who enjoyed relations with myriads of women) or pompous declarations about what Wayne symbolized. Instead, he focuses on the career of the Duke (the name of a boyhood dog), carefully charting his rise from a modest Iowa family—his father, who frequently failed and eventually left, was sometimes a druggist—to his enduring status as one of Hollywood’s most popular actors, despite his intransigent right-wing political views in a left-wing community. Nothing happened quickly. Wayne worked behind the scenes and took modest walk-on parts before gradually finding his place as an actor. It was John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) that ignited his career, though even then he did not leap to stardom. More minor (and bad and horrible) films followed, and Eliot, to his credit, pulls no punches in his assessments of Wayne’s performances. However, the author also agrees with Wayne’s conviction that the liberal Hollywood establishment denied him Oscar nominations even for his finest roles—in The Searchers, for example, a 1956 film (and Wayne performance) that Eliot continually praises. Eliot is careful to quote reviews of key performances, to let us know the box office successes (and failures) and to give us a peek at Wayne’s behavior on the set. We also see his relationships with key directors John Ford and Howard Hawks, and there are plenty of touching moments—e.g., Wayne’s final appearance at the Oscars shortly before he died of stomach cancer.
A close, unblinking look at a bright star with some internal darkness.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0062269003
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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