Engrossing profile of unrelenting excess.
Diligently reconstructed life story of a man who readily laughed off lables like “bounder” and “cad” while elevating that of “Latin lover” to both art form and profession.
Porfirio Rubirosa was born in 1909 to a militarist adventurer who instilled in him the code of tiguerismo (ultimate Dominican machismo). His fate was sealed by his being sent, a failed high-school student, to France for academic rehabilitation—and then some. Levy, film critic for the Portland Oregonian and chronicler of mega-celebrities (Rat Pack Confidential, 1998), tracks “Rubi” through the nighteries and brothels of Paris, then back to his impoverished home island, where he dared dance, sans permission, with the daughter of the Dominican Republic’s emergent dictator, Rafael Trujillo, as a young lieutenant (albeit with connections) at a military ball. Even El Benefactor (one of the Caribbean’s cruelest despots) knew the girl was enthralled by the cosmopolitan bon vivant and shortly blessed their marriage. It wouldn’t last; neither would those with French actress Danielle Darrieux or American multimillionaire heiresses Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton, but it set Rubi up as a vague Dominican diplomatic fixture for decades. “I can’t work,” he once told a reporter, “because I don’t have time for it.” Meanwhile, women came, in the off-hours of his various marriages, and fell, including Christina Onassis, Eva Perón and Zsa Zsa Gabor. According to Levy, Rubirosa’s basic attitude was reflected in a comment on his father’s tendency to have illegitimate children: “My mother got fat,” he explained. During World War II, he sold Dominican visas to European Jews for up to $5,000 each, but professed to be far more interested in spending money than making it. When he fatally crashed his Ferrari in 1965 after a night of revelry, the money was almost gone. A fitting end, most said, including his then wife, French actress Odile Rodin, half his age.
Engrossing profile of unrelenting excess.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-00-717059-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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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