A veritable hagiography of actor, auteur, and man's man Eastwood. Time film critic Schickel (Brando: A Life in Our Times, 1991, etc.) interviewed Eastwood at length for this volume, and although the word ``authorized'' is not stamped on the cover, this is by no means an objective appraisal of Eastwood's life and films. Eastwood grew up in and around Oakland, Calif., hung out at jazz clubs, endured a stint in the army, and struggled as a little-utilized contract player at Universal Pictures before the TV series Rawhide put him on the map in 1959. Schickel is doggedly completist about reviewing all of the actor's credits; a single guest appearance on Mr. Ed requires two pages of background, synopsis, and hyperbolic pontification (``It could be said, indeed, that this was a historic occasion''). Schickel smugly stresses the extent to which Eastwood's critical standing has improved over the years, halting frequently to pummel Pauline Kael for her Eastwood animus. Eastwood is notoriously taciturn; in the comments he offers here he avoids messy self-revelation with the same efficiency and economy that govern his aesthetic in films like High Plains Drifter and Unforgiven. Schickel glosses over Eastwood's unfaithfulness to his wife and subsequent women in his life as ``one of the ways he defines freedom.'' An early '80s flirtation with the right-wing wacko Bo Gritz—Eastwood financially supported Gritz's mercenary incursion into Laos to find Vietnam-era POWs—is similarly treated as an understandable, well-meaning mistake (at least Eastwood is appropriately embarrassed about the adventure). While Schickel's not on Clint's payroll, his book reads like the longest publicity release in history. (24 pages photos, not seen) (First printing of 100,000)
Pub Date: Nov. 29, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42974-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1996
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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