A dispiriting account of a great star and not-so-great human being.
On-screen and off with the “King of Cool.”
Veteran celebrity biographer Eliot’s (Paul Simon: A Life, 2010, etc.) portrait of film star Steve McQueen (1930–1980) is a curiously sour reading experience. The subject emerges as a singularly petty and unpleasant personality, a minor talent who left a meager cinematic legacy completely out of proportion with his enduring status as an icon of mid-20th-century “cool.” In this telling, McQueen’s less-than-impressive filmography is the result of the star’s persistent small-mindedness, as he habitually gravitated toward working with directors he could dominate and turned down promising roles—he could have been the Sundance Kid, but walked when he couldn’t get top billing over rival Paul Newman—out of spite, laziness and easily injured ego. A hardscrabble childhood led to a period of small-time criminality and military service before McQueen drifted into acting, attracted to the profession for its many opportunities to smoke dope and sleep with pretty young actresses. He made a hit with the TV series Wanted: Dead or Alive, in which he perfected a sullen, wary, catlike screen presence that radiated charisma and danger, and he would keep sounding those same few notes throughout his career. Eliot praises McQueen’s iconic impact in such films as The Magnificent Seven, Bullitt and The Getaway, but these successes come off as lucky intersections of good timing and congenial material rather than the expression of a significant artistic talent. Eliot’s matter-of-fact recounting of McQueen’s gluttonous appetite for drugs, compulsive womanizing, sickening instances of wife-beating and petulant bullying are difficult to stomach, as they seem less like the torments of a complicated artist than the sordid habits of a profoundly spoiled, selfish, bitter man. The author writes of McQueen poring over the script of The Towering Inferno, counting his lines to make sure that co-star Paul Newman didn’t have more to do and childishly insisting on delivering the last line of the film. That about sums it up.
A dispiriting account of a great star and not-so-great human being.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-45321-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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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