A premature biography, shallow and uninspired. Quentin Tarantino might be a talented filmmaker. He has written a few well-received scripts and directed two clever though overhyped films—Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction—but he has nothing approaching an oeuvre to his name. His career is still inchoate, even fetal, and the history of Hollywood is heavy with talents that quickly crashed and burned, sometimes justly, sometimes not. Bernard may be a movie critic for New York's Daily News, but she writes like an amateur gossip columnist. Despite a palsy-walsy ``Quentin'' tone, she wallows in trivial scandal, chronicling Tarantino's every spat and unkindness as he climbed the greasy pole of success from video-store clerk to film director. In Bernard's portrait he emerges as an ego-driven ingrate, breaking promises, betraying friends, all of which, of course, have almost nothing to do with his talent. More usefully, Bernard illuminates Tarantino's substantial ``borrowings.'' In a manner that transcends mere postmodern art-about-art, Tarantino's work is fundamentally rooted in and derived from other films. Sometimes it is just a gesture here, a line there. And then there is Reservoir Dogs, for example, a great deal of which is ``inspired'' by a Hong Kong action movie, City on Fire. As T.S. Eliot once wrote, ``Minor poets borrow. Great poets steal.'' Where Tarantino fits in this formulation is far from certain yet. Patience is its own reward. Perhaps Tarantino will one day merit a biography; it certainly won't be this one. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-095161-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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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