This new biography of one of America's greatest filmmakers places great emphasis on the nasty side of his personality. As Davis (History/Southern Methodist Univ; The Glamour Factory, 1993, etc.) shows, Ford was a difficult man to know and to work with, a cantankerous, irascible genius with a penchant for hard drinking and verbal abuse of actors and technicians. That doesn't, however, dim the brilliance of his films, as Davis points out: Ford won six Oscars, and his filmography boasts some of the greatest achievements in American cinema, including Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, How Green Was My Valley, My Darling Clementine, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. A first-generation Irish- American, Ford fancied himself as a tough, working-class son of the Ould Sod and wasn't above mythologizing his roots. Davis traces his life and career in equal parts, from his Maine childhood (on which this book is refreshingly enlightening) to his silent-movie days in the budding film industry and on through his many triumphs. Davis appears to have interviewed virtually every surviving member of Ford's informal stock company, eliciting often disturbing stories of his off-set alcoholism and on-set temper. The story of the director's physical and emotional decline toward the end of his career makes for particularly painful reading. However, while Davis has added some brush strokes to the existing picture of Ford, his book is repetitive and frequently dull. Davis has little of interest to say about the films themselves, adding nothing to the already voluminous critical literature, and his occasional excursions into psychobiography are off-target (as in the fatuous, casual suggestion that Ford might have been a repressed homosexual). Although not without its useful contributions to the Ford story, this book does not fill the need for a definitive biography of this major American artist.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8061-2708-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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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