The author’s writing is rough—the apt word, the eloquent phrase and a consistent tone elude him—but his perceptions will...
This critique of Day’s career shows that the major American icon was also a major American talent.
Did Doris Day, Miss Goody Two-Shoes, the constant virgin, really carve out “one of the truly great show business careers in show business history?” Skeptics, especially those who are baby boomers, will do well to consider the forthright, knowledgeable and convincing case for Day’s acting and singing that Santopietro (The Importance of Being Barbara, June 2006) makes here. Day, he reminds readers, reigns as the biggest box-office star in Hollywood history. She appeared in 39 films and released over 600 recordings. Yet her acting, the author concedes, ranged from “brilliant to awful.” He blames Warner Bros. for putting her in a series of second-rate musicals to sate audiences who, during the ’40s and ’50s, adored her as the image of can-do America. And he cites Day’s husband-manager, Marty Melcher, as also having a negative impact on her career. Yet in all the uneven work, Santopietro observes Day’s talent shining through. He admires her sharp, brightly judged performances, playing witty, forthright and, yes, sexually sophisticated women in Love Me or Leave Me, The Pajama Game and The Man Who Knew Too Much. But by the late ’60s, he concludes, younger audiences misperceived her image as chaste, compliant and saccharine, too nice for the rebellious world they made out in the streets. The star survives, the author feels, her dulcet, intimate, heartfelt singing captured in a series of LPs she recorded in the late-’50s and ’60s that put her on the shelf with Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee as unforgettable interpreters of American popular song.
The author’s writing is rough—the apt word, the eloquent phrase and a consistent tone elude him—but his perceptions will send readers to Day’s CDs and DVDs for an overdue re-take.Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-36263-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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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