Yule has written better-than-average lives of Al Pacino, Sean Connery, and David Puttnam, among other works; here, Richard Lester only seems a lesser figure until you weigh his full plate of achievements. Lester (b. 1932) broke into entertainment in Philadelphia in 1951 at WCAU-TV, where he mounted five shows daily, including a personal failure featuring himself whose reviews begged for the show's death. Philadelphia offering little future, then, he took off for England, fell in with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan, fresh from radio's The Goon Show, and directed them in a new TV show, Idiot Weekly, whose surreal comedy lifted English reviewers into ecstasies. This was followed by A Show Named Fred, then by Son of Fred—which failed because Milligan had gone overboard with minimalist sets and lost the audience. But Lester showed he could deliver amazingly funny film with the 11-minute classic The Running, Jumping, Standing Still Film and the full-length musical It's Trad, Dad!—two films that induced the Beatles into accepting him as director of their first film, It's a Hard Day's Night, and then of Help! Yule has much fun showing Lester improvising on the script and the Beatles inventing much of their material—George Harrison actually wrote, ``What do you call that haircut?'' and John Lennon's reply, ``Arthur.'' Later, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum let Lester work with Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, and Buster Keaton, and was followed by the hilarious How I Won the War (featuring John Lennon), the San Francisco farce Petulia, and The Three Musketeers and its sequel. We watch him film Robin and Marian, Superman II, Superman III and still another Musketeers sequel. Also included is the script for a scene written for Paul McCartney but then deleted from the final cut of A Hard Day's Night. A running, jumping biography that never stands still except for a final interview with Lester, now much more cautious about his projects.
Pub Date: March 21, 1994
ISBN: 1-55611-390-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
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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