Marilyn's love life, or sex life, following in the trashy tradition of Wayne's Ava's Men, Grace Kelly's Men, Crawford's Men, etc. This is a book that should have been printed on bedsheet linen instead of paper. As ever, Wayne focuses on the men Marilyn knew, loved, and/or married on the Hollywood carousel, starting with Marilyn's stories of child abuse and rape—although her first husband, Jim Dougherty, whom she married at 16 to avoid being returned to an orphanage, swore she was a virgin in the bridal bed. Marilyn had several versions of premarital sex. Wayne adds as topping: ``Yet another version is that she became pregnant at fourteen and put the baby boy up for adoption when it was a few days old, but this is untrue.'' Dougherty ships out with the Merchant Marine, and Marilyn, working in a defense plant, is discovered by photographer David Conover. Soon, she's the cover girl for Laff, Peek and See, U.S. Camera, and dozens of other mags, and then is servicing impotent, elderly Joe Schenck of 20th Century-Fox, falling in love with older vocal-coach Freddy Karger, and caught up in dozens of illicit affairs. Wayne posits Monroe's abortions—not counting miscarriages—at 13 or 14, tells of her early days as a bar girl, suggests that she never had an orgasm despite the attentions of sophisticated lovers such as Orson Welles, Yves Montand, Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Brando, Sinatra, and others. The author recycles endlessly, pastes together familiar materials about Marilyn's last days and the possibility that she died in a hospital, then was returned to her bed, etc., but this second-, third-, fourth- or fifth-hand account carries almost no weight. Stick with Arthur Miller's Timebends. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: Aug. 20, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-07633-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
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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