That cloudless rarity, a book that you hope will never end. Matthau tells of life with her two best friends, millionairess Gloria Vanderbilt and Oona O'Neill, daughter of Eugene O'Neill and wife of Charlie Chaplin; of her marriages to William Saroyan and Walter Matthau; and of her lifelong friendship with Truman Capote. All that could make this simply a superior memoir. But something at once concrete and cloud-borne in Matthau's voice binds the reader to the sheer openness of her feelings—and the honesty of her lies. Her childhood: an illegitimate birth, foster homes, and then sudden wealth when her mother marries a pioneer in aviation. Carol, Gloria, and Oona form a honey-faced trio of beauties who come at you like walking cupcakes. Gloria is the poor little rich girl who marries aged conductor Leopold Stokowski, later loses all her money, then goes into business franchising her name and makes more than she inherited. Oona, 18, marries Chaplin, 52, raises a huge brood, then dies of ``a broken heart'' (drink, really) after Chaplin's death. Matthau marries Saroyan twice, finds herself chained to a sick gambler and rotten (not to say insane) tyrant famed for loving humanity. Her third buddy throughout life is Capote, whom she meets when he is on a ladder spying on her in her bath. Then she meets another sick gambler—mordant, married Walter Matthau—and has a four-year affair with him. The lovers' dialogue reaches a grand wittiness, with Walter ready to bet away the ground under Carol's feet. Life with Walter is a masterpiece of pain and laughter, underwritten by Carol's own lingering, near-fatal illness. Time will blunt its shears on this triple-resistant book. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-58266-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1992
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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