Engaging, warm chronological memoir of Cary Grant, assembled from his own words and those of friends and fellow actors by Nelson, who represented Grant on the lecture circuit during his last years. This is a big, solid Grant biography that towers above recent books that show the actor ingloriously as a neurotic tightwad and bisexual. Nelson met Grant while arranging for his ``Evenings with Cary Grant''—Grant made 36 such unrehearsed appearances, speaking intimately to 1,000 to 3,000 listeners and answering questions for about two hours a show, to standing ovations. While Nelson pastes together her hundreds of quotations with quiet skill, she sometimes gets things wrong, as with Grant spending heavily to track down Plaza-owner Conrad Hilton to complain about getting only one half of an English muffin—a story that makes Hilton seem cheap. In fact, Grant got three halves and explained to Hilton that he was losing good will by not offering the fourth. Grant, born in Bristol, England, as Archie Leach, left school at 13 to go on the road as a dancer-tumbler-stilt-walker-pantomimist with the Pender troupe, skills that stayed with him for life and that brought him to America where he became a Coney Island stilt-walker, then a success in Broadway musicals. His first film was a bit in Singapore Sue, but it wasn't until 1937's The Awful Truth (directed by Frank Capra) that his gift for suave farce and physical comedy set him up as Hollywood's greatest farceur. By then he'd married and been divorced by Virginia Cherrill, Chaplin's blind girl in City Lights. Among the more moving episodes here is Grant's romance with young Phyllis Brooks, whose mother dampened any wedding bells. All speak of Grant's grace, taste, generosity, great wit and style, and the smashing quotes from his ``Evenings with...'' prove every word. Forget the other books, this is it. Superb. (Sixty-eight b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1991
ISBN: 0-688-10610-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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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