The King of Tragedy is discovered behind the King of Hollywood—by the Queen of Trash Bios. In her tenth Hollywood bio, Wayne (Gable's Women, 1987; Crawford's Men, 1988; Ava's Men, 1990; Grace Kelly's Men, 1991, etc.) goes beyond paste-up to embark on self-plagiary. She makes no mention of Gable's Women and simply jumps into rewriting herself, adding clips from familiar scenes about Gable from her bios of his lovers Crawford, Gardner, and Kelly. Is this a new book? Well, maybe, but no page smells fresh. Once more we get the famous fights, the seethings and soothings, dramatized in Wayne's own dialogue, as between Gable and Crawford: ``I'm sick and tired of this Rhett business.'' ``Not if I play Scarlett. We're dynamite together.'' ``Yeah.'' ``You'll insist?'' ``Carole [Lombard] wants the part, too.'' ``Scarlett's not a blonde, for Christ's sake!'' ``I wouldn't know because I haven't read the goddamn book!'' Wayne's Gable is ``an alcoholic, a bland love, a scoundrel, an egotist, and an opportunist who hit the casting couch for a homosexual encounter with a well-known leading man to get into films.'' And he has a tragic mother-complex. The gay encounter, with a friend of gay director George Cukor, later resulted in Gable having Cukor replaced on Gone with the Wind when Gable didn't want his past dug up. But we've read this story in Gable's Women, just as we've read and reread about the star's affairs with Ava, Joan, and Grace, and about his run-in with Marilyn (in Marilyn's Men, 1992). Even Lombard's knitting of a special little sleeve for Gable lacks zip. Wayneland recycled.
Pub Date: June 9, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09259-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
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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