A vast improvement over Robbins's earlier bios of Yul Brynner, James Stewart, and Billy and Ruth Graham, largely because Durante (1893-1980) was such a greathearted, lovable man with his giant schnozzola and his witty ``moiderin'' of the English language. Durante got his nose from his mother, who bore him on a kitchen table in Brooklyn (`` `Holy Smokes!' yells da neighbor lady whose deliverin' me. 'Dis ain't da baby, it's da stork!' ''). He early showed a mastery of the piano (``My father thought I'd become a concert piano player like that Russian guy, Sir Rockinoff'') but was diverted from the classics to playing ragtime and jazz in Coney Island bawdy houses. Soon, Durante married Jeanne Olson, a singer, who guided him into better jobs. His career spanned nightclubs and speak-easies, Broadway, Hollywood, radio, records, and TV, and included two comebacks. His early films are forgettable turkeys, his successes Jumbo and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. In nightclubs Durante began telling more and more jokes to establish that he was the leader of the band, yelling, ``Stop the music!'' and erupting with a comical outburst. But the greater his successes, the more his wife drank, feeling alienated from Durante, who attracted the Broadway greats. After 22 years of marriage, Jeanne died of a heart ailment and alcoholism. Remarrying at age 67, Durante and his second bride, 39, adopted a girl. Later, after a stroke felled the actor, his friends attested that there was something in him that brought out the best in them. Durante died at age 86. Swift but moving, light but not thin. (Photographs.)
Pub Date: Nov. 20, 1991
ISBN: 1-55778-418-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
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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