Too tawdry by half and as groundbreaking as a Wikipedia entry.
There is nothing in these pages from celebrity biographer Eliot (Steve McQueen, 2011) that will come as a surprise to those who have followed the actor through his career and personal life.
While it may be fun to remember that Nicholson duly made his appearance on Matinee Theatre and that he took a turn on the Andy Griffith Show, there is no sense of the author digging for the goods: new material, a fresh perspective or insights into Nicholson’s moviemaking. Mostly, readers will wonder at the blatantly obvious comments—e.g., “although it took many hard years to happen, he eventually became a star.” As for Nicholson’s notorious sex life, it either throws a creepy Freudian shadow—“The seeds of sex were clearly planted in Jack from a very early age. ‘I was very driven. I remember being at least mentally sexually excited about things from childhood, even sooner than eight’ ”—or touches that too-much-information chord: “While tripping [on LSD], he could confront the persistent problem of premature ejaculation.” Movies take a back seat to goodies like a tour with Michael Douglas, where there were all the “young and beautiful women. They devoured them like shrimp….According to Jack, tongue firmly in cheek (and elsewhere), the tour was all about politics, social behavior, and women.” Eliot makes it extremely difficult to take the work seriously or want to take Nicholson so. When the author starts committing pop psychology—“Women were no longer purely objects of desire but a form of self-affirmation, that he was still able to get them”—it is clear the whole project has taken a wrong turn, way back somewhere.
Too tawdry by half and as groundbreaking as a Wikipedia entry.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-88837-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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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