Like the rough draft for the real memoir, the one with a personality included.
The life and times of the novelist, screenwriter, Hollywood mini-mogul and borderline workaholic.
Sheldon came from humble beginnings in Depression-era Chicago to become the brand-name author of airport bestsellers (Are You Afraid of the Dark?, 2004, etc.). Although this memoir mostly catalogues his successes, Sheldon begins by revealing that in 1934, when he was 17 and working at a drugstore, he was stealing sleeping pills so that he could commit suicide. Despondent that his life wasn’t going anywhere, he was determined to do the deed just as his father walked in on him. A born salesman, Otto Schechtel was able to talk his son out of it, but that seems about the last positive thing he did. Sheldon worked desperately to become successful, even changing his last name at the advice of a manager, and there’s some genuinely entertaining material here covering his ascension to film- and bestsellerdom. An impressive combination of chutzpah, writing talent and blind luck led him from Tin Pan Alley to Hollywood, where he was soon knocking out B-picture screenplays. Broadway shows followed, as did A-list picture credits (he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer), and eventually Sheldon joined the ranks of megawatt producers. That whole business about his being the most-translated novelist in the world—he is listed in the Guinness Book of Records—comes later, more as an afterthought. It’s his success in the movie biz that Sheldon wants to talk about. Among other things, it’s an opportunity for name-dropping, a habit he overindulges in.
Like the rough draft for the real memoir, the one with a personality included.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-53267-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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