Arriving on the heels of Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan’s biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, Green’s memoir is both...
A lusty, reflective, score-settling memoir from the woman who steered a chaotic career course between Rolling Stone and The Sopranos.
In this debut book, Green recounts the lively, raucous tale of how she found, lost, and regained her groove, smoking dope and winning Emmys in the process. The well-educated daughter of “upwardly striving East Side Jews,” she headed west in the late 1960s with a diploma from Brown University, a rich boyfriend, and only a vague sense of what to do when she got there. By dint of luck, as well as talent, Green wound up at Rolling Stone, scoring a cover story on Marvel Comics (where she had briefly worked) that established her trademark droll tone. “Go be ironic” was her mission, and she delivered with numerous significant pieces, including profiles of Dennis Hopper at his most obnoxious and David Cassidy at his most naïve. Besides breaking a pot-befogged glass ceiling—she distinguished herself among “the brainy and evolved sugar candy that was the girls of Rolling Stone”—she happily indulged her inner wild child. She also got sloppy—e.g., setting out to interview the children of the late Robert F. Kennedy, she “crossed a journalistic line” by sleeping with his son. Although her career briefly bottomed out, Green staged an impressive comeback as a TV writer who could navigate both the high (Northern Exposure, The Sopranos) and mid-range (Blue Bloods) plateaus. Her story is wildly picaresque—upper-middle-class to rags to homes in New York and Los Angeles—revealing (especially when dealing with the backstage politics of TV production), and at times wearyingly materialistic and self-absorbed.
Arriving on the heels of Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan’s biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, Green’s memoir is both a solid insider’s account and a happy-go-lucky, lifelong coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-44002-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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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