People who love star autobiographies will no doubt find this satisfying, though younger readers, who’ve never heard of Mod...
Predictable memory-tripping by the erstwhile star of Mod Squad.
Lipton, famous for her role as Julie Barnes in Mod Squad, describes a childhood filled with secrets: no one talked about her grandfather’s mistress, a black maid; or the baby who died when a nurse dropped him; or the possible suicide of an uncle; or the abuse Lipton sustained at the hands of her aunt’s husband. But Lipton rose above all these tangles to become a model and actress, starting out with small bit parts, then becoming a household name in Mod Squad. She recounts a heart-wrenching affair with Paul McCartney and a fling with Elvis Presley. Finally, she meets the love of her life, Grammy-winner Quincy Jones. Withstanding criticism from a public uncomfortable with an interracial union, Jones and Lipton married in 1974. They had two children, and Lipton threw herself into motherhood, giving up acting completely. Then, in the mid 1980s, the marriage fell apart. Lipton’s description of the end seems coyly incomplete: the divorce seems to come out of the blue, and Lipton explains only that she “needed spiritual guidance from within” and that “though the karmic cord wouldn’t be cut for years,” the “fourteen-year cycle” of marriage and child-rearing with Jones was over. After leaving him, Lipton returned to acting. Her descriptions of the post-marriage, post-Mod Squad phase of her career are the strongest sections here. The chapter on Twin Peaks, the David Lynch television show with Lipton playing Norma Jennings, is fascinating and passionate. It reads with an immediacy and vigor that much of the rest lacks. Indeed, Lipton leans too often on tired, unimaginative prose (Her “daughters. . . will always be there” for her, “Losing a sibling is devastating”).
People who love star autobiographies will no doubt find this satisfying, though younger readers, who’ve never heard of Mod Squad, are unlikely to pick it up.Pub Date: May 9, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-32413-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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