A warm and well-researched—though not particularly compelling—appreciation of one of the stage’s most beloved performers...
The charmed life and times of Broadway sweetheart Mary Martin (1913-1990).
Longtime theater critic Kaufman’s (Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door, 2008, etc.) biography of stage star Martin will tick all the boxes for ardent fans of the performer—the author deftly summarizes her career and personal history—but those not part of the cult will find a curiously bland subject. Martin’s gift was an endearing quality, a unique ability to emotionally connect to audiences in a live setting; while a more than able vocalist, she lacked a truly distinctive vocal instrument, and her early-career onscreen forays (her attempts at movie stardom would come to naught) proved lackluster and unmemorable. Martin shone on the Broadway stage, where she capitalized on her winsome charm in storied productions of South Pacific, The Sound of Music, and, most famously, Peter Pan. Martin’s work in these roles inspired adoration, but there is precious little to dig into: the shows were masterpieces, she was excellent in them, and that’s about it. Perhaps attempting to invest dramatic stakes in the tale, Kaufman alludes to rumors of lesbian relationships between Martin and actresses Jean Arthur and Janet Gaynor, but gently and without much evidence to support the claims. The author evenhandedly recounts Martin’s longtime marriage to the gay, dictatorial Richard Halliday, a difficult personality who clashed terribly with Martin’s son, the free-spirited actor Larry Hagman (the product of a previous marriage), but even here the narrative lacks any real tension or drive. Kaufman has produced an encomium rather than a page-turner.
A warm and well-researched—though not particularly compelling—appreciation of one of the stage’s most beloved performers and, on the evidence here, least interesting legends.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-03175-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2016
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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