Loving, worthy, absorbing, at times wonderfully revisionist about acting, the Brando book we've waited for. Now let Brando...
The best Brando biography ever, focusing on his films and acting, by Time film critic Schickel (Intimate Strangers, 1986, etc.).
Schickel's opening chapter speaks directly to "Marlon Brando'' and apologizes for writing about him, saying Brando's privacy will not be invaded and explaining that this book was signed for six years ago and finished before Christian Brando was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. A quixotic chapter—it is unlikely that Brando will ever read it, and it addresses him with a strained intellectuality that Schickel's warm intentions cannot overcome. It's strange that Schickel misjudges his ideal reader, the revered actor himself, when his eye for following the actor's evolution stays clear and on target, and grows more lively as the book gathers complexity and responds to suboceanic waves in Brando's career while ignoring tons of personal anecdotes that earlier bios served up with ribbons. This is a book of ideas and of Schickel's generously open-spirited mythomania for Brando, the idol of a generation. Its flaws are few: a low estimate of Apocalypse Now; the slip that Brando falls to his death from a balcony in Last Tango in Paris; such disgust with The Appaloosa that Schickel forgets to name the picture. Schickel pauses at major turnings in Brando's career to weigh the actor's talents, how fearlessly he used his sense of risk and danger and shocking power of improvisation; how strongly his childhood as the son of two alcoholics shaped both his personal life and his genius; how he repressed his best self. The last chapter, in court and with Brando unchained before the press, saving his son from excess ink by taking it on himself, is quite moving.
Loving, worthy, absorbing, at times wonderfully revisionist about acting, the Brando book we've waited for. Now let Brando bring coherence to his life in his forthcoming autobiography.Pub Date: July 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-689-12108-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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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