Next book

MY SISTER ROSEANNE

THE TRUE STORY OF ROSEANNE BARR ARNOLD

Standard entertainment news, with a sad story and some interesting Barr background, from a sibling with an ax to grind. Roseanne's wounded younger sister Geraldine tells her side of the story, from their childhood in Salt Lake City through their 1990 break-up, with Schwarz (co-author of The Peter Lawford Story, not reviewed, etc.) as literary enabler. ``We'' is a very important pronoun in this book. Roseanne and Geraldine dreamed of becoming the Jewish sisters who took Hollywood. In the early 1980s, empowered by sisterhood and ``Sisterhood,'' Geraldine mapped out a ten-year plan to launch Roseanne to stardom as America's Domestic Goddess. Roseanne was the performer in their sister act; Geraldine ``delighted in being backstage...making the spotlight possible for my big sister while never challenging her right to be the sole occupier of its glow.'' They wanted their own sitcom, starring Roseanne as a blue-collar working woman, and including a sister Jackie, a lesbian modeled after Geraldine. The plan was to use humor to advance their feminist agenda and to start a production company that would bankroll other women. But only one of the two overweight sisters was destined to see the Promised Land. In 1990, wildly successful and just beginning her relationship with Tom Arnold, Roseanne fired Geraldine. Soon after, she accused her parents of incest and child molestation. Geraldine, who sued unsuccessfully for some share in Roseanne's take, defends her parents. There were problems at home, she says; their father was sometimes inappropriately angry. But he was, if anything, the source of Roseanne's talent, an ``influence on her delivery and stage presence.'' With the whole story out of her system, Geraldine forgives ``Rosey'': ``May you one day also come to know such peace despite currently being in the midst of a hell of your own creation.'' A Geraldo show waiting to happen, with the laughs courtesy of Roseanne.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994

ISBN: 1-55972-230-4

Page Count: 341

Publisher: Birch Lane Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Next book

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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

Close Quickview