The nanny's-eye view of the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow meltdown. Groteke was a college student when hired in the summer of 1991 to help care for the younger of Farrow's children (there were nine at the time—two more were adopted during her tenure). She worked for the family during the turbulent two years that followed, when Farrow discovered Allen's affair with her daughter Soon-Yi and later accused him of molesting their seven-year-old, Dylan. Groteke is a member of Farrow's camp, but she doesn't mince words: Her depiction of the actress is not flattering. More compelling than her rehashings of the by-now familiar accusations and counteraccusations are her cannily framed snapshots of daily life in the Farrow household. Allen was often icy (he ignored most of the children) but could turn on practically irresistible charm. Farrow was part child-saving saint, part ``doormat.'' After the Soon-Yi discovery, she continued to talk on the phone to Allen as often as ten times a day, made her older children her confidants as she publicly nursed her ``broken heart,'' and contemplated taking in more children. While Groteke says she hasn't ``the foggiest idea'' of whether the molestation occurred, she highlights changes in Dylan's behavior (i.e., heightened physical modesty) that took place at the time. Farrow meanwhile vacillated between obsessive crusading and a state of depression and fear verging on paranoia (she was convinced, for instance, that her apartment was bugged). But as time passed, she regained strength and equanimity. Groteke (assisted by People magazine writer Rosen) delivers the goods: loads of telling details of a family at once genuinely loving and severely troubled. Followers of this most lurid of family feuds will find Groteke a rare source: a spankingly sensible insider whose allegiances don't seem to circumscribe what she reports.
Pub Date: May 16, 1994
ISBN: 0-7867-0066-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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