A volume for those fed up with “news” about Oprah’s weight and the Bennifer breakup.
Collection of provocative profiles from Vanity Fair, showing those who’ve lived on Mars for the past ten years the power celebrities wield in America.
A sex scandal destroyed movie comic Fatty Arbuckle’s career in the 1920s; today it would make him bigger than ever. That’s essentially the conclusion Orth draws in her portraits of Madonna, Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, and others. The public’s appetite for celebrity news may go further back in time than the author acknowledges, but there’s no arguing with her statement that cable TV’s 24/7 reporting has turned the public into celebrity news bulimics. Just about anyone, Orth writes, can feed the media and become famous, whether or not they’re talented (to wit: Madonna). And someone famous can get away with just about anything (to wit: Woody Allen taking nude pictures of the adopted daughter he would eventually marry, or Michael Jackson dangling a baby from a hotel window). Orth also describes how Andrew Cunanan became the darkest of American celebrities when he shot and killed Gianni Versace and then himself. She builds a disturbing case for the influence of celebrity millions in political arenas as she reports on Bill Clinton’s presidential pardon of billionaire Marc Rich. Of course, Orth herself writes for a celebrity-driven publication, and these pieces will be read (with some guilt perhaps) by readers eager to scarf up crumbs about Liz and Liza. The author’s use of quotes from unnamed sources and her subjects’ former employees is journalistically questionable, but her details hit their marks, as in the profiles of deposed Maggie Thatcher and retired ballerina Margot Fonteyn. Dame Margot makes Orth nostalgic for the days when the famous were also talented.
A volume for those fed up with “news” about Oprah’s weight and the Bennifer breakup.Pub Date: May 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7545-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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
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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