Meade (Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?, 1988, etc.) returns to the Jazz Age with this bio of the great filmmaker and actor Joseph Frank ``Buster'' Keaton, timed to coincide with the centennial of his birth. Warning readers from the outset that she is focusing on his life rather than his films, Meade retells Keaton's story in somewhat more detail than previous biographers. The actor was born to Joe and Myra Keaton, unsuccessful medicine-show performers who became unsuccessful parents. But Keaton (and the physically violent stunts his father performed on him) enlivened their moribund act and made them vaudeville stars. Meade goes into copious detail in recounting the comedian's literally knockabout infancy and childhood and offers perfunctory attempts to situate him in a world before mass media. She chronicles his meteoric rise in the nascent movie industry, his working relationship with Roscoe ``Fatty'' Arbuckle, and Arbuckle's decline in the wake of his trials in the alleged manslaughter of starlet Virginia Rappe. Meade closely traces the consequences of Keaton's disastrous marriage to Natalie Talmadge and the sordid history of his in-laws. She recounts the harrowing downfall that accompanied his ill-advised decision to sign with MGM at the end of the silent era (and reconfirms the belief that Irving Thalberg deserved some blame for the destruction of Keaton's career). After the dismal times of the late '30s and '40s, Keaton rebounded thanks in no small part to the advent of television. Meade is the first Keaton biographer to detail his prickly relationship with film buff Raymond Rohauer; to give the devil his due, the obnoxious Rohauer emerges with considerable credit for saving Keaton's films from oblivion. One wishes that despite her warning Meade would talk more about the films and their making. The failure to do so leaves a large hole in the center of this account. A competent biography, seldom stirring but highly informative.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017337-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
