by Kate Lardner ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 11, 2004
One melancholy baby, with every right to be so. (Photos)
The story of the author’s life as stepdaughter to the blacklisted screen and television writer Ring Lardner Jr., with a subcurrent of foggy but appalled unhappiness.
A disembodied narrative voice gives this memoir’s first third a hazy, uninflected tone. “What I remember most about Coldwater Canyon is an old wooden gate falling on my head,” Lardner writes. “I don't know how this happened.” As a tool for the scattershot memories of youth, this dreaminess is effective. The dreams take on more edge and gloom after Ring Jr.—referred to throughout as her father by the author, who was three when he married his brother David’s widow—is convicted of contempt of Congress for replying, when asked if he is a member of the communist party, “I could answer, but I’d hate myself in the morning.” The middle section, comprised largely of letters, clippings, and addenda from Ring Jr., covers his prison years. It highlights the mundanity of getting by during his year in Danbury Prison, when his sense that communism extended beyond economic equality into cultural and political spheres only sharpened, and the thrill when her mother found work on TV or radio. (Frances Chaney was also a communist and suffered from the blacklist.) Finally come the consequences for the author of those early years: her mother's distancing (“Acting was my higher power, baby. That's the only place that I knew about God”), her father's drinking (a five-page letter to him from Dalton Trumbo spells it out in spades), both parents’ relentless chiding of Kate about her weight (father called her “Potato Dumpling,” while mother preferred “Miss Turnip”), and the general family reticence. Little wonder Lardner turned to drugs, which perhaps induced the haziness that returns in the memoir’s third section, chronicling what should have been the good times: college, marriage(s), children. Happily, therapy worked for her, and she can tender a clean and sweet chronicle of her father’s death.
One melancholy baby, with every right to be so. (Photos)Pub Date: May 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-45514-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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