The inside book on Woody Allen that his fans have been waiting for. This will likely be the cornerstone of all future Woody Allen studies, sincefor the first timeAllen himself is completely forthcoming with an interviewer and willing to fill in on his biography and comment on any aspect of his work. You could not ask for an Allen book that gets closer to the bone. Lax (Life and Death on 10 West, 1984; On Being Funny: Woody Allen and Comedy, 1975) kept by Allen's side for three years during the writing, making, and editing of five films, followed scripts through their development, had the door opened for him by Allen to speak with all of Allen's friends and co-workers, which is to say that this is a book Allen was eager to see and warmly endorsed. This writing is unique in that while it stays generally on course as a chronology of Allen's life, it forever interrupts itself to show at length how later works spring out of earlier events in Allen's life, which gives a dense weave to the telling as scenes are discussed out of biographical order. The Allen who comes across here is a very cool and reserved person on the set who has to crank up his warmth when he plays ``Woody Allen'' for the camera. We follow his childhood compulsion for moviegoing through his Wunderkind years as a teen-age jokesmith for columnists and great TV comics, then his being taken under the wing of agents Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe, whoin a grueling two-year periodturned him into a reluctant stand-up comic. They've never had a contract beyond a handshake, and quite early on Rollins and Joffe won complete artistic control of his films. Allen openly talks about his marriages and love life, his children, his failureshe never looks at his films after they're released, has no videocassettes of them, only sees their shortcomings (although The Purple Rose of Cairo comes closest to realizing his hopes), and he detests tapes of his early work on Candid Camera, The Tonight Show, etc. In one fascinating passage he comments on these routines while watching tapes, dismantling them in bloody surgical detail. Definitivefor now. And sheer heaven. (Sixteen pages of photographsnot seen.)
Pub Date: May 16, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-58349-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
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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