The director of perhaps the finest film of the past 30 years is presented as erratic, grandiose, and mysteriously boring for so great an artist. Schumacher (Crossroads: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton, 1995, etc.) marches respectfully from Coppola’s birth in Detroit (his middle name was for the automaker) to UCLA film school and through all his films and legal skirmishes. There’s much here, and it should be great fun—his training with Roger Corman, his friendship with George Lucas, his run-ins with the press (including the “I pattern my life on Hitler” remark)—but it’s not. For starters, there’s not quite enough new stuff on the popular films, though a lot is provided on less well-received efforts. On The Godfather, details of the transformation of ponytailed Brando into Don Corleone, James Caan’s prep work for the role of Sonny, and “persuasive methods of blocking production” (e.g., bomb threats) are catnip; more would have been welcome, particularly given the space granted Apocalypse Now and The Cotton Club. Quotes from actors such as Talia Shire and James Caan provide fresh air, but the many Coppola quotes are stifling. His relentless attacks on the press and the film industry, combined with his excessive optimism (or misreading) regarding reaction to his films, undercut reader interest in yet another quixotic venture (say, Tucker), no matter how visionary the director is. In addition, Schumacher’s intermittently off-the-mark film analyses (viewing Peggy Sue Got Married from the male protagonist’s perspective) and bland descriptions (the disastrous casting of daughter Sofia Coppola in The Godfather, Part Three is simply “one of the most controversial casting decisions of his career”) will make film-literate readers feel patronized and suspicious. Coppola emerges as a boorish genius and the book as a comprehensive but exhausting read. When it ends and the glazed eyes refocus, you’re left with the unsettling realization you’ve just spent 500 pages on the man who directed One From the Heart. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 3, 1999
ISBN: 0-517-70445-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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