Rich material in plain packaging.
The 60 Minutes warhorse, now 87, recounts his most memorable interviews.
Wallace again teams up with Gates, his collaborator on the 1984 memoir Close Encounters, for this look back at an impressive 60-year career in journalism. In chapters including “Presidents,” “Icons and Artists” and “First Couples,” interview excerpts are interspersed with commentary from Wallace. While the writing is straightforward as it can be, the man has met enough notable people to make the book fascinating. Wallace applies a light touch when discussing chief executives, trying to find the good in irascible characters like Nixon and LBJ (Wallace recalls that LBJ once forced 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt, his passenger, out of a car on his Texas ranch to pick up a candy wrapper and then drove off). He also gingerly handles icons like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. But in two standout chapters, “The Middle East” and “Con Men and Other Crooks,” Wallace’s needling style is on full display. The title, in fact, comes from the conspiratorial phrase he uttered to elicit a startling on-camera confession from Chicago crook Phil Barasch. Among the more amusing exchanges here is that between Wallace and Salvador Dalí. When Wallace asked him why he adores old age, the painter responded, “Because the little young peoples completely stupid, you know.” Wallace admits that it was years before he realized “how profoundly wise” Dalí was on the subject of age.
Rich material in plain packaging.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-4013-0029-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
