What was then labeled “the worst case of dynamite in Hollywood history” seems pretty tame today, but Sorel’s command of tone...
A charming slice of retro Hollywood tabloid scandal.
Though the book might have benefitted from a few more of the author’s exquisite illustrations and a little less explication, this exhumation of the “Great American Sex Scandal of 1936” allows the artist to fully indulge the obsession he’s carried for the last half-century. When Sorel (Certitude: A Profusely Illustrated Guide to Blockheads and Bullheads, Past and Present, 2009, etc.) was replacing his kitchen linoleum, he found newspapers alluding to the scandal featuring the diary of actress Mary Astor, who was in court to regain custody of her daughter and whose estranged husband “planned to use the diary to prove she was an unfit mother….Mary, he claimed, had not only kept a tally of all of her extramarital affairs but graded them.” Though the subsequent pages recount the story of young Mary’s exploitation, first by her parents, then by the movie industry, the playful tone suggests a more innocent era and a time when the glamorous Hollywood, amid the transition from silent movies to talkies, gives the artist the opportunity to “draw that exotic place when it was just at the beginning of its love affair with art deco.” As the narrative traces Mary’s rise and fall, it also provides an account of “how Eddie Schwartz morphed into Edward Sorel,” a story that ultimately provides some parallels with Astor’s and suggests why her plight so strongly resonated with that of the renowned magazine illustrator. In addition to diary excerpts and other research, the book features an extended interview between the author and “the long-dead actress” as the “proselytizing atheist” attempts “to channel her in her Catholic heaven” and get her to tell her story about the beginning of her notorious affair with Broadway’s George S. Kaufman.
What was then labeled “the worst case of dynamite in Hollywood history” seems pretty tame today, but Sorel’s command of tone and pen sustains readers’ interest.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63149-023-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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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