An entertaining, insightful, and tragic memoir about trying to make it in show business.
Lewis’ (Flower Drum Songs, 2006, etc.) memoir recounts his love affair with Hollywood.
At the beginning of this tale of unrealized Hollywood dreams, Lewis warns the reader, “If you go to Tinseltown wishing upon too many stars, beware.” Raised in a family of aspiring actors and dancers, Lewis was captivated at an early age by the aura of stardom. The local movie halls and dance studio, the radio with its colorful broadcasts, and the television with its live-action serials: each presented Lewis with different avenues to celebrity. From his first “acting” gig as an extra in a Bette Davis movie filmed in his hometown, Lewis embarked on a career in musical theater with his friend and collaborator Mike. The two entered the world of Los Angeles stage productions, competing with actors and pretenders at the beginnings and ends of their careers. Encountering the sheer mass of people, talented and otherwise, who were also attempting to “make it,” they were quickly dissuaded of their dreams of meteoric success. The road was long and beset by many tragedies (particularly for Mike), but Lewis saw a glimmer of vindication when he learned that his musical about the Ringling brothers was Broadway-bound. Lewis narrates his story with a mix of wide-eyed awe and amused hindsight that allows the dreamy Hollywood magic of it all to remain more or less intact. He doesn’t come across as bitter; his loves for spectacle and celebrity are still found in his descriptions of the industry. A number of celebrities make cameos over the course of the memoir, but by far the most fascinating characters are the anonymous aspirants trying to live the dream with a strange combination of ambition, fantasy, and narcissism.
An entertaining, insightful, and tragic memoir about trying to make it in show business.Pub Date: Dec. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692306932
Page Count: -
Publisher: Big Dipper Press
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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