Entertaining and well-written, a worthwhile read for Ball’s fans who can stomach the sorrows she endured after her heyday....
A dismal glimpse of a legendary comedienne’s reclusive retirement, told in a series of engaging anecdotes by a fawning confidant.
Tannen, who befriended Lucille Ball during her final ten years (1979–89), focuses on her professional decline and her marriage to “second rate comic” Gary Morton. An I Love Lucy fanatic since childhood who was four decades younger than the star, Tannen claims to be Gary’s sister’s husband’s cousin––“a third cousin twice removed or something like that.” Despite this distant relation, he became Ball’s close friend and a credible spokesperson, winning the approval of her daughter, Lucie Arnaz. At her best, Ball made Tannen laugh, especially when she failed to recognize Katharine Hepburn on the phone and made “one of those contorted gestures with her mouth the way Lucy Ricardo would do when she was caught doing something naughty.” But Ball’s best rarely appears. She merely tolerated visits from her children and obsessed over her ex-husband, Desi Arnaz. By 1986, her “all too familiar trademark and gestures seemed tired and her legendary comic timing just wasn’t there” when she starred in her last sitcom, Life with Lucy, a humiliating flop. An outmoded has-been unable to get work, Ball dreaded showing her aging face in public and struggled to maintain her identity during her forced retirement. Divulging both Ball’s clinical depression and her lust for pranks, Tannen reveals the similarities and discords between the real woman and her merry on-stage persona. Refraining from scandal, but not from name-dropping and melodrama, the author spices up Ball’s humdrum retirement-hours of playing backgammon and watching Wheel of Fortune, with cameos from Shirley MacLaine and Liza Minnelli.
Entertaining and well-written, a worthwhile read for Ball’s fans who can stomach the sorrows she endured after her heyday. Those more intent on family drama and dirt on Desi should check out the more sensational accounts of Kathleen Bradley and Tom Gilbert.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28753-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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
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