Enough already.
Slapdash account that adds a few grains of new information to the Monroe file with transcripts of tapes the actress made for her psychiatrist.
Boasting the dubious distinction of participation in both the Monroe and the Kennedy industries (The Men Who Murdered Marilyn, 1997; Vendetta: The Kennedys, 1993, etc.), Smith obviously has no problem with beating a dead horse. The tape transcripts run for just a few pages and reveal little of significance, and before even turning to those monologues the author devotes half his narrative to rehashing the details of Monroe’s death. Agatha Christie herself would have been challenged to connect the dots of the evidence at the scene. Jars of pills by the bedside first stood empty, then filled. The bedroom first looked neat and orderly, then chaotic, with papers strewn about. A washing machine hummed in the background—someone washing away evidence, perhaps? Smith does not believe her psychiatrist and the Kennedys killed Monroe, as others have claimed. Instead, he suggests the culprits were CIA operatives eager to topple a political dynasty by setting up the star’s death as a Kennedy plot. The idea seems plausible, though Smith builds his thesis on a stack of ifs, maybes, and might-have-beens. As for Monroe’s tapes, they cover such unedifying topics as taking enemas and having sex with Joan Crawford, plus a few predictable comments about working with Laurence Olivier (“a great, great actor”) and the peculiar remark—perhaps Monroe was just being funny—that the Bible is “a good script.” The repetitious, disorganized text contains glaring factual errors (Garson Kanin, not George Cukor, directed My Favorite Wife; Judy Garland was a young teen in the 1930s, not the 1950s) and enough grammatical howlers to give an English teacher a migraine.
Enough already.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1380-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
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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