A quirkily intelligent memoir of finding oneself in movies.
A Brooklyn-based writer and editor’s memoir about how watching John Hughes films as an adolescent gave meaning to his troubled life.
Rolling Stone sports editor Diamond grew up a member of the Jewish minority in suburban Chicago. For the first few years of his life, his mother and his candy manufacturer father lived an American dream that included “two cars [and]…a house…built with the money made from rotting the teeth of children who could only afford to spend a quarter on snacks.” His life changed dramatically after his parents divorced. By the time he was 7, he had attended four different schools and become “the weird kid [whom] nobody knew.” It was then that a babysitter introduced him to Hughes’ Pretty in Pink, which immediately became his favorite film for the comfort it gave him that even kids who were different could “still be cool.” As Diamond grew older and began watching more of Hughes’ movies, he found that they helped him to make sense of things like the social divisions in high school, where “everyone had his or her place, just like in a Hughes movie.” But then his mother, who could not cope with their rocky, adversarial relationship, moved away and left her son to fend for himself. Clinically depressed, homeless, and often drunk or high, Diamond turned even more to Hughes’ feel-good films to help him make sense of an unforgiving world. He then moved to New York, where he decided that he would write the director’s biography. After spending most of his 20s bouncing between Chicago and New York, often unhappy and endlessly revising a book he would never publish, his life finally came together. Both funny and heartbreaking, Diamond’s memoir is not just an account of how one director’s films impacted—and perhaps saved—his life. It is also a memorable reflection on what it means to let go of the past and grow up.
A quirkily intelligent memoir of finding oneself in movies.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-242483-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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
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