Breathless prose and many juicy revelations—an absorbing read.
An erstwhile “friendly acquaintance” who fell out with Rumpole of the Bailey’s creator over this biography strips back the man’s jovial veneer to reveal dark and adulterous activities.
Former Sunday Express editor Lord (NIV: The Authorized Biography of David Niven, 2004) delivers a tell-all exposé of the beloved writer and barrister. Indicating early on that Mortimer has a propensity for grossly exaggerating the truth, he briefly dispenses with his formative years and then tries to glean as much information as possible about his eventful life. Mortimer’s marriage to fellow writer Penelope Fletcher is painted with a lurid palette, the nadir of their tortured relationship coming when he impregnated both Fletcher and actress Wendy Craig while also trying to conduct an affair with another thespian, Shirley Anne Field. Such incidents are typical, contends Lord, who catalogues his subject’s various infidelities in great detail and often using words that may bemuse non-U.K. readers (e.g., “he rogered her”). But the author also takes time to document Mortimer’s glittering professional achievements, carefully steering the narrative through his work as a barrister, which saw him successfully fighting against a ban on Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn and supporting ’60s counterculture publication Oz in a slightly less triumphant case. But Mortimer’s wandering eye continued to get the best of him; Lord neatly divides the text among relationship woes, the barrister’s strong socialist leanings and the birth of his children (including the actress Emily Mortimer), before delineating the events that turned an authorized biography into an unauthorized one.
Breathless prose and many juicy revelations—an absorbing read.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-33082-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
