An epic biography of one of America's most popular and iconographic movie stars. John Wayne, who used to boast, ``I don't act, I react,'' brought a relentless and sometimes compelling trademark sameness to almost every role in the 200 movies he starred in. The irony, as historians Roberts (Purdue Univ.) and Olson (Sam Houston State Univ.) note, is that ``he had never served a day in the military and he was America's ideal marine; he disliked horses and he was the country's favorite cowboy.'' The authors try to make the case that it was precisely because of such contradictions that Wayne was (and is) America personified. They are more convincing when they stick to the detail and circumstance of Wayne's lifewhich they do relentlessly. In fact, this is not so much a tell-all as a tell- everything biography. Still, there are fascinating digressions on the economics of B movies, Hollywood in the McCarthy era, John Huston (who rescued Wayne's free-falling career in the '30s), and so on and on. The authors are admirably restrained in psychoanalyzing Wayne, but their insights into his character are invariably shrewd and subtle. They convincingly connect, for example, his guilt over avoiding military service during WW II to his later, rabid anticommunism. They also detail at length how his personality was ultimately shaped, even absorbed, by his roles. Over the years, John Wayne the man and the actor both endured an almost ceaseless barrage of criticism, but as Roberts and Olson (who coauthored When the Domino Fell: America in Vietnam, 19451990, 1991) demonstrate, he had an undeniable ``something,'' a force, a charisma, a basic decency that still radiates in his films. Despite its occasional clunkiness, this is very likely to be the definitive Wayne biography for years to come. (38 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-923837-4
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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