Kudos to the author for mostly avoiding her family’s “curse,” but the book, occasionally revelatory, is weighed down by...
Actress-turned-author Hemingway (Mariel’s Kitchen, 2009) ponders her life and career in light of her famous family’s self-destructive history.
Born just after her famous-author grandfather, Ernest, committed suicide in 1961, Mariel Hemingway was immediately thrust into a family legacy historically marked by suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction and mental illness. Her parents both struggled with alcohol dependency, while her sisters Muffet and Margot would fight depression their entire lives (Margot eventually died of a suicidal drug overdose at age 42). Although she grew up in rural Idaho, Mariel couldn’t resist entering the glamorous world of show business as a teenager, initially riding the coattails of Margot, who had rocketed to quick fame as a model in New York City. But with a breakout role in Woody Allen’s 1979 comedy Manhattan, Mariel’s star began eclipsing her sister’s. Mariel would then go on to a respectable career as a midlist actress in the late 1970s and 1980s, riding hit movies like Star 80 and Superman IV. In her 20s, Hemingway also found herself in one tension-filled relationship after another, first with legendary screenwriter Robert Towne, then with one of the founders of the Hard Rock Café chain—not to mention a few brief celebrity flings. Although the memoir is ostensibly about how the author conquered the so-called “Hemingway Curse,” it’s never really explicit as to how this was accomplished. However, it’s clear that Mariel never quite bought into the Hollywood dream or her own celebrity. She maturely managed her life and career without too many psychic scars and luckily ended up bypassing addiction to controlled substances or alcohol (although she did have a predilection for black coffee binges). By the end of the book, we find her psychically well-adjusted enough to be the author of a self-help book and this generically positive but fairly uneventful celebrity memoir.
Kudos to the author for mostly avoiding her family’s “curse,” but the book, occasionally revelatory, is weighed down by self-discovery platitudes.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941393-23-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Regan Arts
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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