Empty pillow talk.
A superficial biography of a major film star and icon.
Rock Hudson’s acting was nearly always wooden, though some make a case for his work in the cult film Seconds. He reigned, nevertheless, as a box-office champ for at least two decades, his handsome face and brawny chest drawing sighs on in movie palaces. Behind the Hudson phenomenon stood Henry Willson, the lecherous gay agent whose nearly evil machinations Robert Hofler reveals in The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson (2005). Bret has little to add to this or any other account of Hudson’s famous life. It’s now well known that Hudson struck poses outside the gate of Universal Pictures, eventually winning bit parts, even though he fluffed lines and blew takes from day one forward—even after he became a major star in Magnificent Obsession and Giant. Hudson’s death from AIDS also capped rumors swirling for years that he was gay. Like a summer-stock actor, Bret obsesses over sleeping arrangements, the one aspect of his account that may add new but not surprising or significant details to the Hudson legacy. Rock, it seems, made out with buff blond extras who worked his films, eventually demanding them as one of his perks. Hudson also liaised with other famous, closeted actors, some of them—Troy Donahue, for example—named here, accurately or not, for the first time. On this matter and others, Bret’s sourcing is frustratingly vague. As primary sources, he lists several previously published books and some unpublished articles. He cites no references in the text and apparently did no interviews for the book. Those who enjoy seeing what someone else saw through the keyhole may not care who peeped.
Empty pillow talk.Pub Date: March 15, 2006
ISBN: 1-86105-855-1
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Robson Books/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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