by Mary Woronov ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 1995
Actress Woronov (Wake for the Angels, 1994, not reviewed), best known today for her work with Paul Bartel and Roger Corman, recalls her early career as a film personality and hanger-on with Andy Warhol. Woronov grew up in a troubled family, her beautiful mother hooked on pills, her stepfather a likeable but cold doctor. As a child, she was prone to uncontrollable fits of rage and violence and apparently more than once came within an eyelash of being expelled from school. By the time she was an art major at Cornell, she was ripe for a radical change, and stumbling into the Warhol circle was at best a fortuitous accident. Once she met up with them, Woronov dropped out of college, running away to join the Warhol circus. The rest of the story is an unending parade of drugs, drugs, drugs, interlarded with tales of internecine warfare among the various groupies, wannabes, and central figures surrounding Warhol. ``Talent, of course, meant nothing to this crowd,'' she writes at one point. ``I was the only one who memorized my lines and no one even noticed.'' From the frantic and tedious goings-on, it's clear how such an achievement might have gone unremarked. Readers looking for some insight into the fascination that Warhol exerted on the underground scene of the '60s will come away from this slender volume unenlightened. What they will have received instead is a sort of drug-induced dime- store surrealism, a book for people who think that rock record liner notes are the pinnacle of literary achievement. And it takes itself so damned seriously. Dull, distasteful, depressing, and without the saving graces of humor and wry self-knowledge that have made Woronov such a delightful performer for Bartel. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1995
ISBN: 1-885203-21-7
Page Count: 252
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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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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