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
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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