Luce once contracted to write her autobiography, which she planned to call The Dream of My Life. Morris perceptively reveals...
The second volume in the life of a significant American figure.
By the time she was 40, Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987) had been an actress, Broadway playwright, war correspondent, managing editor of Vanity Fair and Republican congresswoman from Connecticut. Married to the enormously wealthy publisher Henry Luce (Life, Time, Sports Illustrated et al.), she went on to become the first woman ambassador (to Italy, appointed by Eisenhower) and, after her conversion to Catholicism, author of several books on religion. Luce held political views passionately: A fierce anti-communist, she was equally outspoken in support of civil rights for African-Americans. Morris (Rage for Fame: The Ascent of Clare Booth Luce, 1997, etc.) earned Luce’s trust and access to more than 460,000 items in the restricted Luce Collection at the Library of Congress. Blonde, beautiful and glamorous (Morris includes details about Luce’s sumptuous wardrobe at every occasion), she took many lovers, with a special preference for men in uniform. Her “compulsion to charm” was, writes the author, “a drive more for devotion than sex. She wanted to conquer all comers, even though her interest in them could be short-lived.” And conquer she did: Both men and women succumbed, with the notable exceptions of Harry Truman, who refused to receive her at the White House, and Cyrus Sulzberger, chief foreign correspondent of the New York Times, who “was appalled” by her “arrogant conceit” and “ruthlessly hard-boiled self-assurance.” Luce’s frenzied need to engage in all-consuming work was fueled by a daily round of stimulants and sedatives; she fell into black depressions and paranoia, especially if she felt rejected or ignored. Desperately, she needed to be the center of attention.
Luce once contracted to write her autobiography, which she planned to call The Dream of My Life. Morris perceptively reveals the nightmare in this evenhanded and intimate portrait.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-679-45711-4
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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