Worth reading not for its revelations about famous names, but for the author’s ability to trace her journey through the many...
A diverting traipse through the world of fashion and film also reveals the struggles of a modern working woman.
Born in Oakland, former model Bing (A Wrongful Death: One Child’s Fatal Encounter with Public Health and Private Greed, 1997, etc.) grew up privileged in most ways, attending boarding school and then embarking on a successful modeling career in New York and Los Angeles. She spends a large part of the book discussing her friendships and acquaintances with big names like Mickey Cohen (the famous West Coast gangster), David Merrick (the Tony Award–winning theater producer) and Edward Ruscha (the successful pop artist). Though it’s entertaining to read about Cher’s baby shower, her brush with Warren Beatty at the Troubadour or her close friendship with Cass Elliot, this aspect of the book rings somewhat hollow, as though she is telling her audience what she thinks they want to hear from a famous model. Amid the name-dropping and mentions of casual drug use, however, there are profound, poignant moments as well, such as her discussion of her close-knit yet unconventional family; her open fascination with the lives of street kids and gangsters, which helped inspire her writing career; and her heart-wrenching chronicle of her once-vibrant and stylish mother’s decline into sweatsuit-wearing self-starvation. In these recollections, the author’s writing finds a steady rhythm that effectively conveys her passion, trepidation and love—what seems to be the real Bing underneath the famous model exterior.
Worth reading not for its revelations about famous names, but for the author’s ability to trace her journey through the many joys and obstacles of life in the modern era.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59691-481-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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