However bold, West’s quotes don’t fully define her iconic life, and Chandler does very little to fill in what’s missing.
A vacuous biography of the little chickadee.
Asked why she donated her used limousines to nuns, West said, “I just can’t stand seeing a nun waiting for a bus.” The is one of a handful of quotes available in this latest from celebrity biographer Chandler (Not the Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford, A Personal Biography, 2008, etc.). Unfortunately, the author offers little perspective on the life of the legendary writer, performer and personality. As in her other “personal biographies,” Chandler offers transcriptions of her long interview sessions with the likes of Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Alfred Hitchcock and others. The memories of a deep bond West shared with her mother are touching, and Chandler offers piquant details of time served in a New York City jail when authorities deemed one of West’s plays obscene. But the author should have heeded George Cukor’s observation that West “always had what you might call a selective memory” and challenged some of the actress’s sometimes dubious assertions. The star said, for example, that her films rescued Paramount Pictures from bankruptcy at the onset of the Great Depression. Chandler lets West’s claim go unchecked, without going over the studio’s balance sheets for other films, or considering how the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields, to say nothing of their directors and writers, also kept Paramount in the black. Chandler also provides scant insight into West’s appeal to the public—or her lack of appeal after the 1930s. The author’s flat plot summaries of West’s films and plays, wedged between West’s eventually tiresome, narcissistic musings, make no distinction between the comic brilliance of She Done Him Wrong and the grotesque excesses of Myra Breckinridge, arguably one of the worst films ever made. She shared her last years with a bodybuilder who rationed the chocolates she ate after dinner, a moment in a sad demise Chandler lets pass without comment.
However bold, West’s quotes don’t fully define her iconic life, and Chandler does very little to fill in what’s missing.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7909-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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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