Lavish and extravagant, gossipy yet even-handed, maximizing a great story: likely to become the standard text on the...
A Hollywood biography more dramatic and enthralling than most of what its subjects produce.
Although they were the quintessential Hollywood power couple, Edie and Lew Wasserman never cared for publicity—and with good reason, as they came from different sides of the same crooked coin. Born in Cleveland in the early part of the 20th century, Edie to a wealthy German-American Jewish family and Lew (then Louis) to dirt-poor Russian-Jewish immigrants, they each had roots in organized crime. Edie’s father was an infamous fixer for the Cleveland Syndicate, while Lew booked nightclub acts into Mob-owned joints in Cleveland, then Chicago, for the nascent MCA talent agency. Boston Globe Hollywood correspondent Sharp (In Good Faith, 1995) begins her narrative in 1958, when the couple were already king and queen of Hollywood, judiciously ladling in the juicy background info later. By the late ’50s, Lew was not only running MCA, the mega-agency that locked up most of the Hollywood talent just as the studio system began to crumble, he had recently bought the land that cash-strapped Universal sat on, becoming the studio’s landlord and ultimately its owner for a mere $12 million. After that, the coups rat-a-tat, as Lew courts up-and-coming politicos JFK and Reagan, sidesteps a Justice Department antitrust investigation, maneuvers MCA’s (and then Universal’s) TV division into a profit powerhouse, introduces the modern blockbuster with Jaws, and so on, before passing away in 2002. Not surprisingly, Edie is often shoved to the background here, but Sharp ably depicts her conniving ways as the queen bee of Hollywood society, somebody who wasn’t afraid to use any means at her disposal to get ahead, just like her husband. The author is alternately enraptured and horrified by the Wassermans, as most anyone would be when confronted by such a staggering amount of guile, ambition, and cold-blooded genius.
Lavish and extravagant, gossipy yet even-handed, maximizing a great story: likely to become the standard text on the Wassermans.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1220-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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