Flashy and funny, with flamboyance to burn, just like Hamilton.
Colorful, charismatic star of stage and screen recounts 50 years of the Hollywood life, with the assistance of veteran co-author Stadiem (Too Rich: The High Life and Tragic Death of King Farouk, 1991, etc.).
After Hamilton dishes out some spicy insider information from his stint on Dancing with the Stars in 2005 (steroid use, allowing his partner to blatantly mask his lack of dancing acumen), the actor dives right into his turbulent, nomadic childhood. After his parents divorced, Hamilton’s Christian Scientist mother swiftly moved the family to Hollywood, where many years earlier she had unsuccessfully attempted a film career. The random relocations continued as she discovered better ways to live—and better men to live with. In 1950, when Hamilton was not yet 12, he was shipped off to live with his father, a bandleader in New York City. His urban “adult education” prospered by way of illicit sex with his stepmother, time spent at military school in Mississippi and a short-lived stay in Boston with his newly remarried mother. Following her from there to Washington, D.C., Acapulco and Palm Beach, he realized at an early age that he could garner attention with “the smile I had learned to use to cover all my fears.” His love of the stage took hold at Palm Beach High School, and once he was back in Los Angeles Hamilton’s career mushroomed from smaller roles into a prestigious contract with MGM. From this moment on, he drops Old Hollywood names with wild abandon. Some of the narrative reads like tabloid fodder, with Hamilton right in the middle of all the Tinseltown commotion. (The 69-year-old actor has two sons nearly 30 years apart in age.) His bountiful life has had its share of blunders, the dapper “silver fox” admits, but he is still able to “laugh at myself.”
Flashy and funny, with flamboyance to burn, just like Hamilton.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4502-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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