A readably candid, sharp memoir.
A 20-something playwright and actor’s memoir about her childhood journey to Hollywood fame and teenage descent into contented semiobscurity.
Wilson began acting at age 5. After pestering her mother to let her do commercials like her older brother, she was soon called to audition for a part in the Robin Williams vehicle Mrs. Doubtfire. Her role in that film led to appearances on TV shows like Melrose Place and in movies like Miracle on 34th Street and Matilda, a film with which she would become permanently identified. Yet from an early age, Wilson realized that her cuteness, compared to Shirley Temple’s audience-pleasing good looks, could render her susceptible to the kind of studio control that Temple had faced. “Everyone in the world [would know] a version of Mara Wilson that wasn’t me at all,” she writes. By the time she was a teenager, the looks that had brought her early fame could not compete with those of other young actresses like Kristen Stewart and Scarlett Johansson. Refusing to use cosmetic surgery to try to save a career she questioned, Wilson began to focus more on dealing with who she was: a girl with deep fears and compulsions that had emerged in childhood and had begun affecting her daily life and relationships. Despite her disenchantment with Hollywood, she retained a love of performing, which she continued to do as a student at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and which she eventually merged with another childhood love: storytelling. Immersing herself in a community that included other storytellers, stand-up comedians, and burlesque show performers who showed her the power and joy in “liv[ing] your fear,” the author at last found herself, “her people,” and her creative stride. This funny, at times painful, but always honest book tells a coming-of-age story that is not only entertaining, but also wise. Learning the lessons of self-acceptance and finding strength in vulnerability is often the best success of all.
A readably candid, sharp memoir.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-14-312822-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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