Uncritical, unoriginal, sometimes downright sappy—just like most love letters. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Celebrity biographer Spoto (Notorious: The Life of Ingrid Bergman, 1997, etc.) glides smoothly across the silken surface
of the life of one of this century's most famous women. Seldom is heard a discouraging word in this tribute. In its three sections (Miss Bouvier, Mrs. Kennedy, and Mrs. Onassis) Spoto has set himself a difficult task: to force into the foreground of the Kennedy legend a woman who spent most of her adult life—the post-assassination portion—seeking the shadows. Accordingly, he emphasizes her "remarkable ability as a quick sketch artist"; her skills as a "hilarious mimic"; her grace on horseback; her failed first engagement in 1952; her broken ankle (suffered in a game of touch football with the Kennedys); her leading role in the publication of JFK's Profiles in Courage (1956); her devotion to culture and the arts (Spoto convincingly portrays her as a true intellectual rather than a dilettante); the "almost manic discontent" she experienced during the years immediately after the assassination; her lucrative, laissez-faire marriage to Aristotle Onassis; and her career as an editor, first at Viking (she resigned after a misunderstanding involving the publication of a novel featuring Sen. Edward Kennedy), then at Doubleday, where in the 1980s, says Spoto, she "produced some of the most interesting books of the decade." Spoto struggles to explain Jackie's apparent acceptance of JFK's many extramarital affairs (perhaps she "simply decided that a certain profligacy was part of a man's character"), and he seems determined to establish her as an American queen, asserting that she and JFK "adopted precisely the style of the modern British monarchy." Some of his observations, however, are ludicrous—for instance, that her composure derives from her "alliance with horses," or that she was the "first non-Hollywood star in American history" (Charles Lindbergh? Babe Ruth?).
Uncritical, unoriginal, sometimes downright sappy—just like most love letters. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-24650-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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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