The first serious biography of the legendary comedian in nearly 50 years, and one worthy of its hero. Even people who have never seen a W.C. Fields film probably know him as a man who loved to drink and hated dogs and children. Most likely, they would assume that the onscreen character and the offscreen man were one and the same. But Louvish, in his lively biography, delves beneath the surface and discovers an artist who carefully built this character as a comic construct. The real Fields had nothing against dogs, and, yes, even enjoyed the company of children. (The drinking, however, was authentic.) Louvish, who teaches at the London International Film School, is clearly a Fields fan, and this lends his book a warmth uncommon in show- business biographies. He aims the book at his fellow fans, and uses a chatty, conversational tone: sharing stories and trading opinions and favorite gags over some Fieldsian libation. But the tone doesn't hide the exceptional research he has done. He vividly paints the details of Fields's life and the vaudeville, film, and radio worlds he moved in. Most importantly, in extensively describing Fields's early career, he presents the classic films not as the solitary miracles they appear to be, but as the culmination of an extensive career that saw Fields a major star on the world stage as early as the turn of the century. Louvish is also a novelist (The Silencer, 1993), and in the book's coda (in which he imagines Fields entering heaven and greeting his vaudevillean friends), he demonstrates that even the hokiest of concepts can be moving when presented with passion and commitment. He concludes with a brief but sharply perceived analytical afterword. At last ``the Great Man'' (as Fields called himself, accurately) has a great biography. (photos)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-393-04127-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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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