Stout, readable story about how a nice guy got his acting chops and became one of Hollywood’s greats.
An actor’s life, presented admiringly—after all, the subject is a plain-spoken American beau ideal.
Jimmy Stewart (1908–97), firmly lodged in the motion-picture pantheon throughout the studio-contract days and beyond, was a Princetonian, a modest war hero, sincerely Presbyterian, hardworking, happily married, politically conservative and a preternaturally gifted actor. As depicted by veteran Hollywood biographer Eliot (Cary Grant, 2004, etc.) in a full and fulsome portrait, he truly had a wonderful life. Discounting sojourns in theatre and later in TV, the Hollywood artist enjoyed one of the great film careers, starring in some of the classic Capra and Hitchcock films. Supporting players in his life story include Henry Fonda (as best friend), dazzling Margaret Sullavan, flawless Grace Kelly (for female leads) and an all-star cast of performers, producers, directors and agents. This is the story of how Stewart got the work he wanted and about the making and the makers of movies. There’s the obligatory backlot gossip concerning libidinous actors in heat (apparently their natural state) and some emblematic tittle-tattle. (Stewart, for example, was obliged to allay suspicions of homosexuality by visiting MGM’s in-house bordello.) Eliot succumbs to Variety-style jargon (“helmer” or “body-mover” for “director”) and hyperbolic press-agent syntax (“Jimmy was about to be reborn into the stratosphere of cinematic starlight”) and purple prose (he “was busy diving into the deep waters of Dietrich’s ocean of sexual delights”). The biographer provides major film-plot synopses with sexual and theological implications most readers surely never considered. In a shot at scholarship, he provides footnotes (frequently listing annual Oscars) as well as endnotes (with insufficient citations for many assertions). Nonetheless, Eliot makes abundant errors in minor details. But this casual treatment of extraneous facts hardly interferes with a good story about the movies and one of its stars.
Stout, readable story about how a nice guy got his acting chops and became one of Hollywood’s greats.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-5221-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
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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