A gaudy second installment of memoirs. Collins (Past Imperfect, 1984) is a survivor. For almost 50 years, she has cobbled together a career in mass-market culture- -including TV shows, pulp fiction, and scores of mostly forgettable movies—happily sporting the doe eyes, pancake makeup, and slash of red lipstick they taught her to wear at Fox, where she went to work for Darryl Zanuck in the '50s. Among the events she recollects here are: being touted as a ``vestpocket Ava Gardner''; being picketed by an estranged husband with a sign reading, ``Joan, you have our $2.5 million, 13,000 sq. ft. home. . . . I am now homeless. Help!''; and chatting with Jayne Mansfield, who made small talk as a makeup man shaved her pubic hair into a heart shape. She's had four husbands, younger lovers, and was propositioned by Robert Kennedy (she heroically declined). Though Collins philosophizes about this-and-that (``Fidelity seems to be a trait in short supply with most men, male `equipment' being able to rise to stimulating opportunities with alacrity''), there's not much introspection here. Of Peter Holm, her much publicized third husband, she says simply, ``His tyranny, dual personality and definite sociopathic tendencies were making me feel as though I was playing Ingrid Bergman's role in Gaslight.'' But Collins matter-of-factly describes her life's challenges: Her daughter Katy was hit by a car and badly injured, and Collins spent years as her family's breadwinner, making quickie movies in order to pay the bills. She rarely complains, though like Dynasty's Alexis Carrington, she can be bitchy. Describing her former editor Joni Evans, who testified against Collins in her lawsuit against Random House: ``I was surprised by her raddled appearance and how much older she looked since last we'd met.'' In an earlier age, this would have been perfect reading for under the hairdryer. (photos, not seen) (TV satellite tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 13, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-16997-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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