Eye-opening, entertaining portrait of a fascinating proto-feminist.
A welcome biography of the Broadway star turned California Democratic Congresswoman.
Journalist Denton (Passion and Principle: John and Jessie Frémont, the Couple Whose Power, Politics, and Love Shaped Nineteenth-Century America, 2006, etc.) does a handsome job exploring Helen Gahagan’s early life as an actress and singer as well as her later political activism. The author can’t quite crack the nature of her romantic attachments, particularly to husband and fellow actor Melvyn Douglas and to political mentor Lyndon B. Johnson, but she does better with her driving spirit. “Feisty and curious…strong-willed and theatrical” certainly characterizes the young woman who defied the wishes of her well-to-do Episcopalian parents in Brooklyn and single-mindedly pursued a Broadway career. She debuted at age 22, but despite earning terrific acclaim, acting couldn’t contain her. Gahagan set her sights on opera, apparently quite successfully until her marriage to Douglas took her to Hollywood, where the lucrative jobs abounded. While her husband cavorted with Greta Garbo in Ninotchka (1939), Gahagan Douglas threw herself into social causes such as the plight of the migrant workers, antifascism and the WPA programs in California. She and Melvyn, a supporter of the Democratic Party, befriended the Roosevelts and became a “power couple” in California politics. From 1944 to 1950, she served as one of a handful of pioneering women in the U.S. Congress. Labeled a “radical leftist” for her support of Henry Wallace, blacks and the “liberal vanguard,” she grew increasingly out of touch with the growing conservatism of the time. When she ran for the Senate in 1950 she was roundly beaten by then-Congressman Richard Nixon, whose operatives smeared her as “the Pink Lady.” (She retaliated by giving her opponent his most enduring epithet, “Tricky Dick.”) Denton displays a solid grasp of the ignominious politics of McCarthy-era America.
Eye-opening, entertaining portrait of a fascinating proto-feminist.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59691-480-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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