by Carly Simon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 22, 2019
A behind-the-scenes glimpse at parties where the famous mingle with the famous.
A chronicle of a close friendship that might seem unlikely on the surface.
Early on, Simon (Boys in the Trees, 2015) writes that “no one is more interested in famous people than other famous people,” so perhaps the most avid readership for this thin memoir will be famous people who want to read about famous people writing about even more famous people. Simon and Jackie (no last name necessary) would seem to inhabit different circles of fame, but here they seem equally at home in each other’s worlds. The author and her subject were neighbors on Martha’s Vineyard, and they worked together during Jackie’s publishing career on a series of children’s books. Yet what really brought them together was the friendship each had with director Mike Nichols. “Almost every woman I met during the 1980s was besotted with him….I’m not exaggerating when I say that Mike was the preliminary conduit to Jackie’s and my friendship,” writes the author, as she dishes on just how much and how often Nichols would turn the tables and ask her about Jackie. Little wonder, then, that there was a coolness between the woman he married, Diane Sawyer, and the women who thought about marrying him—or settled for something less permanent. Jackie asked Simon to sing at her daughter’s wedding, the two went out to the movies together (they avoided Oliver Stone’s notorious JFK), and Jackie warned Simon about marrying her second husband, who turned out to be gay. The author suggests that some might find the two of them to be an odd couple and that she risks “ridicule or denouncement” in writing such a book. But there’s a full-circle irony in how Jackie had long tried to persuade Simon to write a memoir; now she is the subject of her second.
A behind-the-scenes glimpse at parties where the famous mingle with the famous.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-27772-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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