Selective but not sketchy, with vivid, valuable recollections of Broadway during its golden age.
Warm, ingratiating memoir of an acting career spanning 60 years.
Born in 1915 in Brooklyn, Wallach resisted his family’s insistence that he become a teacher. When he failed a qualifying exam (deliberately?), the classroom’s loss became theater and film’s great gain. In the early ’40s, he auditioned for the Neighborhood Playhouse’s feared guru, Sanford Meisner, who told Wallach it would take 20 years for him to learn how to act. After Army service interrupted his assault on Broadway, Wallach returned to Times Square, making the rounds with such fellow hopefuls as Tony Randall, Marlon Brando and a feisty, attractive redhead who later became his wife and frequent acting partner, Anne Jackson. A genial raconteur, Wallach comes up with a good story for every play or film he recalls. One night after making his entrance in The Rose Tattoo, he caught costar Maureen Stapleton turning upstage to yawn. About to begin a performance of The Teahouse of the August Moon, he got a thumbs up from a stagehand who raised the curtain, then fell over dead. The show went on. Film offers came Wallach’s way in the mid-’50s, bringing hard-to-resist opportunities to travel and make good money. His portrait of John Huston directing The Misfits is far less negative than other accounts of that production, and the actor’s vivid sketch of Sergio Leone also bolsters a directorial reputation. Whatever demons may have haunted Wallach’s life are mostly kept offstage. Onstage fights with Jackson in plays like The Madwoman of Chaillot, he writes, became pressure valves that have kept their marriage going for 56 years.
Selective but not sketchy, with vivid, valuable recollections of Broadway during its golden age.Pub Date: May 9, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-101189-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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