Despite its overreach, this is an ambitious portrait of a young actress whose best films are still ahead of her—a first...
The toughest broad in Hollywood gets the Robert Caro treatment.
It’s perhaps beside the point to say that Knopf vice president and senior editor Wilson’s massive biography of Barbara Stanwyck (1907–1990) makes too much of its subject. The first of two volumes, it weighs in at more than 1,000 pages and only takes the subject up to the age of 33. This first installment is as much about the legendary actress’s life as her times: the lavish world of Hollywood as well as the Depression-era reality of people who flocked to see their favorite stars. By placing Stanwyck in this larger context, Wilson seems to be suggesting that she was a key figure of the 20th century, which is, at the least, a bit of a stretch. However, Wilson provides a very real sense of Hollywood as experienced from the inside. Born Ruby Stevens and orphaned at an early age, Stanwyck emerges here as every bit the scrapper she played on screen, an all-consuming whirlwind whose co-stars would be so awestruck that they would often forget their own lines. She wasn’t necessarily the classic beauty; she was the sexy gal who said, “Now get out!” In married life, her toughness varied. She loyally suffered at the hands of her mentor, Frank Fay; on the rebound, she both nurtured and dominated Robert Taylor. While Wilson can lay on the research a bit thick—no salary or household expense gets past her—she deeply scrutinizes every Stanwyck performance up to 1940, letting us see the actress work and, in some key roles—e.g., The Miracle Woman, The Bitter Tea of General Yen and Stella Dallas—really sweat. The author also includes an extensive, mostly helpful series of appendices comprising stage, film, radio and TV chronologies.
Despite its overreach, this is an ambitious portrait of a young actress whose best films are still ahead of her—a first volume that should whet readers’ appetite for the second, provided they have the stamina to stay with it.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-684-83168-8
Page Count: 1056
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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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