A sharply drawn portrait of an ambitious, fierce, and complicated woman.
New York Times features writer and cultural critic Jacobs makes her book debut with a biography of the glamorous, outspoken entertainer Elaine Stritch (1925-2014).
Stritch’s career spanned nearly seven decades, ending in an acclaimed one-woman show that earned her the Tony Award she had long coveted. As an actress and singer, she had middling success, usually hired for a part when a bigger name was unavailable, or when a show went on national tour, or for summer stock. Often, she lost out to Angela Lansbury, who won many of the roles Stritch wanted: as Auntie Mame, for example, which made Lansbury “a definitive star of the musical theater,” and as Madame Rose in Gypsy. “I’m sick of Angela Lansbury,” Stritch once remarked. “I’m sick of people doing parts that I should be doing.” In 1961, her performance in Noel Coward’s Sail Away won accolades: She turned the play “into a one-woman show,” one critic wrote. “Let’s keep the busy Miss Stritch busier.” But there were problems in keeping her busy: a reputation for “being tiresome, over-full of suggestions and not knowing a word” of her lines, as Coward noted; and, increasingly, alcoholism. “They all love Elaine,” Lee Israel discovered when she worked on a feature story about Stritch. “But along the way lots of people have ceased to trust her,” Israel wrote. “She drinks, they say.” Stritch defended drinking as “a wonderful thing for social communication,” but theater critic John Lahr saw a deep vulnerability. She was “the most panic-struck person I ever knew,” he observed, “a hysteric, and completely terrified.” In an engaging, thoroughly researched narrative, Jacobs chronicles Stritch’s career, boosted by working with Stephen Sondheim and Woody Allen; her half-hearted attempts to get on the wagon; her friendships, romances, and marriage; kleptomania and refusal to pay restaurant tabs; and brazen money-grubbing. Put up at a Florida hotel for an event, for example, she brought her entire winter wardrobe for dry-cleaning “at the production’s expense.”
A sharply drawn portrait of an ambitious, fierce, and complicated woman.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-26809-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.
As much about Everywoman as one particular woman, French author Ernaux's autobiographical novel laconically describes the cruel realities of old age for a woman once vibrant and independent.
The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides that the only way she can accept her mother's death is to begin "to write about my mother. She is the only woman who really meant something to me and she had been suffering from senile dementia for two years...I would also like to capture the real woman, the woman who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.'' And she proceeds to tell the story of this woman—who "preferred giving to everybody rather than taking from them,'' fiercely ambitious and anxious to better herself and her daughter—for whom she worked long hours in the small café and store the family owned. There are the inevitable differences and disputes as the daughter, better educated, rebels against the mother, but the mother makes "the greatest sacrifice of all, which was to part with me.'' The two women never entirely lose contact, however, as the daughter marries, the father dies, and both women move. Proud and self-sufficient, the mother lives alone, but then she has an accident, develops Alzheimer's, and must move to a hospital. A year after her death, the daughter, still mourning, observes, "I shall never hear the sound of her voice again—the last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed.'' Never sentimental and always restrained: a deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality.
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.Pub Date: May 12, 1991
ISBN: 0-941423-51-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.
A firsthand account of how the Navajo language was used to help defeat the Japanese in World War II.
At the age of 17, Nez (an English name assigned to him in kindergarten) volunteered for the Marines just months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Growing up in a traditional Navajo community, he became fluent in English, his second language, in government-run boarding schools. The author writes that he wanted to serve his country and explore “the possibilities and opportunities offered out there in the larger world.” Because he was bilingual, he was one of the original 29 “code talkers” selected to develop a secret, unbreakable code based on the Navajo language, which was to be used for battlefield military communications on the Pacific front. Because the Navajo language is tonal and unwritten, it is extremely difficult for a non-native speaker to learn. The code created an alphabet based on English words such as ant for “A,” which were then translated into its Navajo equivalent. On the battlefield, Navajo code talkers would use voice transmissions over the radio, spoken in Navajo to convey secret information. Nez writes movingly about the hard-fought battles waged by the Marines to recapture Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and others, in which he and his fellow code talkers played a crucial role. He situates his wartime experiences in the context of his life before the war, growing up on a sheep farm, and after when he worked for the VA and raised a family in New Mexico. Although he had hoped to make his family proud of his wartime role, until 1968 the code was classified and he was sworn to silence. He sums up his life “as better than he could ever have expected,” and looks back with pride on the part he played in “a new, triumphant oral and written [Navajo] tradition,” his culture's contribution to victory.
A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-425-24423-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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