by Mayte Garcia ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 4, 2017
A genial, candid portrait of Prince’s ill-fated turn as a family man.
Prince’s ex-wife recalls the joys and heartbreaks of life with the late superstar.
When Garcia met Prince, she was a 16-year-old military brat living with her family in Germany and making a healthy living as popular belly dancer. With the encouragement of her hard-charging mother, she got a videotape of her moves into Prince’s hands, launching a friendship that, once she was of age, blossomed into a romance. Garcia recalls her early enchantment with the funk-pop-rock virtuoso, from his hotel rooms dolled up by a “foo foo master” assigned to make them homier to his conversational charm to his scent (“like the most expensive shelf in the Sephora perfume aisle”) to notes revealing his vulnerable side (“U’re so pretty. It cheers me up if someone tries 2 ruin my day. Many do”). Prince became her employer (she danced on his tours in the 1990s), first lover, and, in 1996, husband. Garcia’s memoir is mostly a warmhearted remembrance of life with Prince, but she also recalls chafing at life in the gilded cage of Paisley Park and, late in their brief marriage (they divorced in 2000), his alienating obsession with Jehovah’s Witness doctrine. The deepest wound, however, was the 1996 death of their week-old infant son, who was born severely deformed; a later miscarriage all but ended their relationship: “If fighting was an ‘exercise,’ the last year of our marriage was a spin class from hell.” Prince could be callous, she recalls: he put her to work less than a month after their son died, was unfaithful, and left her saddled with an expensive property after the divorce. But little bitterness fills these pages. Garcia closes with assertions that she’s moved on (Hollywood Exes, an adopted daughter, an animal rescue) and expressions of regret that Prince’s life was cut short.
A genial, candid portrait of Prince’s ill-fated turn as a family man.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-46897-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
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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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