A professionally reported account, but it’s difficult to imagine an audience other than those with a pre-existing personal...
Gossipy, depressing chronicle of ossified Florida high society.
Nonfiction vet Leamer (Fantastic: the Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger, 2005, etc.) moved with his wife to Palm Beach in 1994. Long a miner of celebrity gossip for his books, he found himself sinking deeper and deeper into the snobbish, wealth-soaked milieus of both Palm Beaches—one dominated by Protestants, the other by Jews. The two sometimes meet, but only superficially and rarely without resentment. Selecting from hundreds of potential protagonists, the author settles on about a dozen, alternating their sagas with sweeping observations about what he sees as a unique social setting. Some of the story lines involve suicide, some murder. Most of the rest portray poorly matched couples of wealthy, vain old men and ambitious young women trying either to claw their way to the top of Palm Beach society or to retain their hegemony over it. The overarching theme is that egregious wealth never buys happiness, at least not for long. Leamer injects himself into the narrative frequently. He observes the gala events, sometimes as an invited guest. He becomes a confidant of certain Palm Beach queens and kings—female and male, heterosexual and homosexual, those born rich and those who have married into wealth. To his credit, he almost always uses real names and immediately informs readers when employing a pseudonym. Stars and supporting players alike are either relentlessly mean or utterly hapless. Leamer conveys the bizarre absurdity of it all, as when an exclusive club makes grudging adjustments to its rigid code regarding the physical appearance of guests in order to accommodate members’ tattoo-sporting or bodily pierced grandchildren. Required to place Band-Aids over the offending markings, “a young guest enters the dining room so swathed in bandages that she looks as if she has just left intensive care.”
A professionally reported account, but it’s difficult to imagine an audience other than those with a pre-existing personal interest in Palm Beach.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2291-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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