by Marianne Gray ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 15, 1996
Like a five-and-dime store, this perfunctory biography of French leading lady Moreau lays everything out, but nothing is particularly valuable. Moreau, along with Catherine Deneuve and Brigitte Bardot, was one of a trio of French actresses/femme fatales who achieved international stardom in the 1960s and helped revitalize French cinema. Sexy, intelligent, effortlessly talented, she worked with some of the world's greatest directors, from Orson Welles to Franáois Truffaut to Louis Malle, and some of her films, such as Jules and Jim and Chimes at Midnight, have become celebrated classics. She also made a huge number of duds and was relentlessly typecast as a prostitute or seductress. As with many actresses, time has not been kind to her. Every year the roles have grown fewer and less involving, and so the woman who gave a powerful, groundbreaking portrait of female sexuality in The Lovers was, 25 years later, reduced to playing raunchy grandmothers. In Gray (Depardieu, not reviewed), Moreau has a sympathetic but overly tactful biographer. Gray's extensive interviews with her subject seem to have produced a kind of biographical Stockholm Syndrome, causing her to gloss over or finesse subjects Moreau finds distasteful: ``Her son, JÇrìme, who has always been kept in the background, is a forbidden subject.'' And so we hear almost no more about JÇrìme. Even Moreau's high-flying affairs with everyone from the usually homosexual Pierre Cardin to Marcello Mastroianni are handled with too much reticence. Gray also tends to a breezy passivity, a reluctance to do the necessary spadework of research; e.g., she freely admits that she has only seen two-thirds of Moreau's films. Gray has certain narrative gifts, but this is simply not a thorough biography. (16 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: April 15, 1996
ISBN: 1-55611-487-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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