Enlightening, exhaustively comprehensive look at an entertainer who unapologetically shimmied sexuality into the mainstream.
Seasoned show-biz biographer Louvish (Man on the Flying Trapeze, 1997, etc.) digs deeper into the saucy bombshell’s hidden life.
Best known for her titillating movie roles and provocative off-screen persona, Mae West (1893–1980) was also a prolific writer who crafted her own image. With the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ blessing, Louvish got a first look at her recently opened personal archives. There, as he writes in the prologue, he uncovered some little-known aspects of the ageless sex goddess’s career. Before delving into those, however, his narrative traces Mary Jane West’s life from her relatively obscure beginnings, growing up in Brooklyn during the early 20th century, through starring roles in various vaudeville performances and burlesque shows to the scandal aroused by suggestive plays like Sex. Stage opportunities began to dissipate as West approached 30, so, encouraged (and spoiled) by her mother, she focused on literary aspirations. The author sidesteps a lot of hearsay to delve with aplomb into his subject’s successful side career. He reveals that, rather than slinking her way in and out of men’s beds as many of her critics would have the general public believe, West spent countless hours alone at home poring over manuscripts. She constantly revised and rewrote her 12 plays and three novels; she also amassed a stockpile of personally penned comedic quips, many still familiar today. Press clippings, lyrics and witty asides enliven Louvish’s pages and his research, while generous illustrations and vintage photographs provide visual proof of West’s brisk ascent to fame as “the highest-paid performer in the U.S.” during Hollywood’s golden era. The author’s knack for injecting new life and a distinctive perspective into well-worn biographical information gives his text a vitality that also characterized this performer, from her first baby steps on stage right up to the time of her death.
Enlightening, exhaustively comprehensive look at an entertainer who unapologetically shimmied sexuality into the mainstream.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-34878-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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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