A life story that consistently charms with candor and the seasoned wit of a master storyteller who’s certainly been around...
The hilariously juicy memoir of a successful novelist, playwright and screenwriter.
Though the hoopla of his literary career is in repose (“the lights dimming a bit”) Friedman (Three Balconies, 2008) is happy to share the grand ascent of his longstanding writing career. The son of a fashionable father and a pretty, theatergoing mother, the author often lost himself in movies and books, sparking an early fascination with media, a journalism degree and two years at a military magazine while in the Air Force in 1951. Friedman penned a “blatantly autobiographical” first story and boldly submitted it to the New Yorker, which “manicured” the prose and published it. While serving as the executive editor of several male-focused publications in 1954, he met and married model Ginger Howard and started a family. Crafted in just five months, his black-comedy breakout novel Stern was published years later while his marriage cracked. In literary circles, the author fondly remembers befriending Joseph Heller, but it was Mario Puzo who curiously wanted Friedman’s opinion on an organized-crime novel he was “moon-lighting.” In between awkwardly hobnobbing in Los Angeles and schmoozing at Elaine’s celebrity-laden Upper East Side enclave, Friedman hit the jackpot with several hit stage plays (Scuba Duba), box-office smashes (Splash, Stir Crazy) and a role in a Woody Allen movie. Whether inadvertently snubbing Marlene Dietrich, chauffeuring Natalie Wood or fist-fighting with Norman Mailer, there are plenty of stories here to solidify Friedman’s ranking as a supreme satirist. Readers with a taste for sensationalistic old Hollywood will particularly enjoy his not-so-casual namedropping, which serves the memoir’s chatty tone well.
A life story that consistently charms with candor and the seasoned wit of a master storyteller who’s certainly been around the block.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2011
ISBN: 9781926845319
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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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