Tart and emotional, with the right degree of circumspection for the parties concerned—or at least those who deserve it. (96...
Stage and screen actress Blair follows her own muse—as a professional actor and committed leftist—in this ever-surprising memoir.
At the age of 16, Blair answered a call for dancers, where she met the young Gene Kelly. They married a year later. She might have been a child bride, but she was also her own person, someone who “voiced bumptious left-wing opinions, wasn't smothered in lipstick, and made a social gaffe by not retiring with the ladies,” at a formal dinner. Her progressive inclinations gave her pause when she considered her privileged position; Kelly's star was on a meteoric rise, they were living in Beverly Hills, and their relationship was pretty darn fine: “What I want,” he told her, “is what I have—you—to pick flowers and read by the fireplace and sing around the house.” Blair's acting career was moving forward as well, but more so was her work with leftist groups, including the Actor's Lab, that “nest of Reds.” The HUAC came calling: Welcome to the blacklist, Miss Blair. But Senator McCarthy wasn't the only snake in her garden. Of the first love affair of several that would end two marriages, she remarks: “I have to admit that I loved it, the secrecy, the adventure, the danger, the sheer wickedness. . . . I felt free—I owned my own body. . . . I didn't belong to anyone.” She never gives the impression that her husbands felt she did belong to them, but it is part of the parcel of the unshrinking Blair's search to understand her life and get her feelings on paper: her guilt, or the lack of it, the nature of her friendships, the studio system, transformation in acting roles (Marty won her a Golden Palm), calling a spade a spade.
Tart and emotional, with the right degree of circumspection for the parties concerned—or at least those who deserve it. (96 photographs)Pub Date: April 24, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41299-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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