Fairy-tale vignettes of love and sacrifice, sprawling homes in the Nashville suburbs, and the hardships of raising children on the road riddle the interviews of Mrs. George Jones with Nashville’s most talked-about spouses. Tempered by Jones’s dramatic spin and her polite nosiness, these true tales of southern celebrity claim a certain entertaining starkness—the same (very popular) starkness as country music. Ghostwriter and collaborator Carter’s invisible imprint may have helped to send each wife’s account on a biographical turn; the chapters take a long-term look at these women’s former lives before they became the luckiest women below the Mason-Dixon line. Revealed covertly beneath their stories of marriage, home, family, and fame is the society of Nashville, particularly the clash between music-industry executive thinking and the traditional southern roles of husbands and wives. Jones repeatedly describes how industry pressures often bring pain to the domestic arena. However, these women’s stories are packaged to save the faces of Nashville heroines before the story inside the story is really delivered. In the chapter about Mrs. Billy Ray (Tish) Cyrus, for example, Tish is introduced alone in her bedroom in Kentucky, crying—with her hand outstretched to the television screen. On the screen, far away in Nashville, her husband croons with ’sexuality and mystery,— as if —unattached,— and only at the insistence of his management—which is looking, of course, for the next Elvis, and hopes he may be It. Ultimately, Billy Ray breaks with old management, makes millions, and everyone stops fighting. To top it off, Tish had given up a potential career in modeling to fit Billy Ray’s on-again/off-again tour schedule—and to act as the proudest president ever of the Billy Ray Cyrus fan club. The wives and the author—a wife herself—work hard to bring the Nashville myth to life. Sometimes, despite all the non-secrets unveiled here, the myth even seems genuine. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-018270-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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