Breathless writing, tight structure, and an endless A-list of stars make this memoir by the younger Garland daughter a movie fan’s parfait. Daughter of Garland and businessman Sid Luft, Lorna writes this book neither to glorify nor to vilify her family, but to tell “a truer . . . story” about “a group of people who grew up in the public eye and got through it all the best way they could.” Thankfully, understatement ends there. Beginning with Frances Gunn’s first steps onstage at age two and ending with her daughter Lorna’s happy second marriage, the book is rife with dramatic events. Skillfully divided into two parts—life with Mama, life after her death—it details Garland’s decades-long chemical dependency (including her first studio-sanctioned Benzedrine) and Lorna’s early life as her caregiver, her emotional swings, and especially her great love for her two daughters and her son, Joe. Lorna also charts Garland’s hard-won sobriety and attempts to bring Liza to detoxification programs. Throughout, the book brims with famous friends: Uncle Frank Sinatra, girlfriend’s parents Bogart and Bacall, JFK and his sweet-voiced wife Jackie, early love Barry Manilow. Everything is presented in a pleasingly sustained voice that blends once-stylish phrasings, self-help lingo, and quirky if awkward locutions to create a linguistic world in which “damn straight, “dysfunctional,” and the kooky line “For every camel, there’s a last straw, and there was for me” coexist. It also suits the writer, for as she presents herself—by turns mature, facile, feeling, and gracious’she is a ’90s everywoman, the person you’d see yourself being if you had been the child of a troubled movie legend. Confessional yet affectionate, this grants weight and closure to an overdiscussed film family. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Literary Guild selection; author tour; TV satellite tour; ABC-TV miniseries)
Pub Date: April 7, 1998
ISBN: 0-671-01899-X
Page Count: 407
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
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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