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THE SEWING CIRCLE

HOLLYWOOD'S GREATEST SECRET: FEMALE STARS WHO LOVED OTHER WOMEN

This trashy, scandal-mongering history of lesbian and bisexual women in Hollywood remains readable in spite of itself. Fran Lebowitz once said that ``if you remove all gay influences from Hollywood, all you've left is Let's Make a Deal.'' In his perfervid attempt to detail this influence, Madsen (Stanwyck, 1994, etc.) names names and dishes dirt with an almost gleeful Çlan. All the usual suspects are featured, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, and the remarkable Mercedes de Acosta, who seems to have slept with everyone. Thanks to Madsen's diligent research, more than a dozen celebrities are also publicly outed here for the first time. When he can't quite muster the factsand the celebrity in question is still alive and possibly litigiousthe author resorts several times to unpleasant nudge-and-wink innuendo. He also fails to make connections between a celebrity's sexuality and its inflection in her acting and choice of roles. Nor does he take full account of the homophobic text and subtext that runs through so many Hollywood films. Others, such as Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet, have trod far more ably here. And for a history, this book is remarkably erratic, spending chapters on some actors and sentences on others and jumping from the talkies to Garbo to the silents with wild abandon. What is interesting in this account is how little has really changed. Production codes that allowed studios to fire an actor for ``moral causes'' may have disappeared, but it is still generally considered career poison for an actor to come out of the closet. In the end this book is little more than a who-slept-with-whom compendium; further proof of how ultimately unrevealing sexuality tends to be and, at least in Madsen's hands, how trite. (24 pages photos, not seen)

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995

ISBN: 1-55972-275-4

Page Count: 368

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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