Stewart's gritty story will appeal to readers interested in her ex-husbands and her own rags-to-riches tale, rife with...
Stewart reflects on her modeling and acting careers and her marriages to actor George Hamilton and rock star Rod Stewart.
Stewart (My Life with Farrah, 2009) grew up in Texas in the 1950s, the daughter of a single mother whose decades-long drug addiction eventually led to her death. Stewart's father left when she was only 1 year old, and she never heard from him again. Describing the effect of her father's absence, she writes, “[t]his has certainly been the pattern for most of life—looking for that 'powerful daddy' that would love me and make me feel safe yet choosing men who couldn't possibly fill those shoes.” Her beloved grandmother, whom she calls "Mama," was her primary caretaker. Following her high school graduation, Stewart got engaged to her first boyfriend, started working as a flight attendant, broke off her engagement, and was the victim of a home invasion and rape. Shortly thereafter, she moved to New York, where her "glamorous years" began. Her striking beauty garnered her immediate success as a model, as well as enormous male attention. The author devotes a good portion of the book to her paramours and her volatile marriages to Hamilton and Stewart, both of whom were already famous. She lists famous friends, such as Elton John, and her book contains photographs with her husbands and various celebrities. In addition to Rod Stewart's infidelity, she writes of raising her three children—a son with Hamilton and a boy and a girl with Stewart—mostly on her own and of her ongoing financial problems. She details her sons' battles with drugs and the terrible guilt she carries for her perceived failings as a parent. Her recollections are surprisingly detailed—a result, she explains, of the many journals she's kept throughout her life.
Stewart's gritty story will appeal to readers interested in her ex-husbands and her own rags-to-riches tale, rife with kiss-and-tell vignettes and the personal insights she's gleaned as an adult.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59315-707-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Vanguard/Perseus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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