Long-awaited, first-class, admiring but unauthorized life of the most popular film actor since Brando—from the author of George Cukor (1991) and Robert Altman (1989). McGilligan could not get to Nicholson, or to many of his close friends, and so depended on those he could, on print interviews (Nicholson has been ``interviewed to death,'' says the author, who himself met or otherwise interviewed Nicholson several times for magazines), and on superior sleuthing in old court records, 1930's newspapers, phone books, and so on. He has undoubtedly turned up stuff about Nicholson's family even the actor didn't know, and Nicholson's veiled but tangled family life is one of Hollywood's knottiest. In 1974, a Time reporter researching a cover story on Nicholson (with Chinatown opening and The Fortune being filmed) unearthed the fact that the woman he thought was his mother was actually his grandmother and that his sister was his mother—a situation amazingly parallel to Chinatown's ``sister-mother'' theme. Nicholson had carefully built up an image of truthful acting and prided himself publicly that ``my family was always big into honesty....'' This revelation caused him many tears, especially since everyone who might have told him something about his mystery father was dead. A native of Asbury Park, Nicholson spent his first 11 years in TV and films as a ``younger leading man'' in duds such as The Cry Baby Killer and Roger Corman schlock epics before his breakthrough in Easy Rider. The still unmarried father of two recent children, Nicholson's constant adultery while professing otherwise to Anjelica Huston for 14 years adds much paprika to McGilligan's book. The thoughtful Nicholson rasp adds vividness to every page.
Pub Date: March 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03482-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
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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