An illuminating look at one of the true greats, full of humor and intelligent analysis—highly recommended.
Portland Oregonian film critic Levy (The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa, 2005, etc.) reckons with the life and work of one of the last great Hollywood icons.
Newman (1925–2008), notes the author, was well-loved for his waggish, self-deprecating charm, his philanthropy and his longtime marriage to actress Joanne Woodward. Of course, the actor also fascinated with his preternatural physical beauty, a fact that haunted him throughout the course of his career and, Levy suggests, was a key factor in his approach to his craft. Newman couldn’t claim credit for his naturally athletic physique or piercing blue eyes, but he could take satisfaction in diligent study and old-fashioned hard work. He was not an obvious natural talent in his early forays into the field—begun while a student at Kenyon College—but rather a beautiful, magnetic charmer, a dilettante reluctant to join his family’s prosperous sporting-goods company. That he achieved his status as a master film actor is a testament to sweaty, unglamorous effort and a mania for rehearsal and script analysis, fed by his participation in the Actors Studio. It often drove collaborators to distraction but slowly paid off in a series of indelible roles in films such as The Hustler (1961), Hud (1963) and Cool Hand Luke (1967). Levy charts Newman’s evolving screen persona, from brash, cocky callowness to irreverent roguishness to gravelly authority, but the author is equally interested in Newman’s storied auto-racing career and philanthropic enterprises, including his charity gourmet-food business and his Hole in the Wall Gang camps for seriously ill children. This industry and energy, along with the boyish love of pranks and dirty jokes, the compulsive self-puncturing of his legend, the devotion to Woodward and the stubborn integrity all reveal an unusually integrated personality so ineffably right for his métier that mere mortals could only look on in wonder and delight.
An illuminating look at one of the true greats, full of humor and intelligent analysis—highly recommended.Pub Date: May 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-35375-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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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