A story of societal change, rich in cultural as well as personal history.
A veteran movie critic for Entertainment Weekly debuts with a chronicle of his love affair with films, his long career at EW (before they laid him off in 2014), and his gnarly love life (until his marriage).
For much of his life, Gleiberman was fortunate. He was able to spend most of his days doing what he loved: seeing and commenting on the movies. His career received a jump-start when, in his 20s, the redoubtable New Yorker critic Pauline Kael became interested in him and helped him get his first job with the Boston Phoenix. The paper fired him, but not long afterward, EW, a new Time-Life publication, hired him. Gleiberman describes his uncomfortable life with his father—for whom wedding vows of fidelity were only a suggestion—his nerdy social isolation as a film freak, his drug and alcohol use, and his uncomfortable, cringe-inducing confessions about his years at EW as a hustler of young women around the office. He pauses often for commentary about films, directors, and performers he liked (and didn’t), is generally kind to his colleagues (not always: Amy Taubin and Peter Travers take some Gleiberman guff), and fiercely defends his dislike for some films that were extraordinarily popular, including Pretty Woman and The Fellowship of the Ring. Throughout, the author’s prose style is conversational, even colloquial. At the end, he writes affectingly of the slow disappearance of newspapers and of print film criticism (“the case for why it matters cannot be made in practical terms”) and the surge of a kind of mass homogenization of cultural opinion that he finds depressing—and irreversible. Sad, too, is his account of his slow slide at EW, beginning with the elevation of Lisa Schwarzbaum to be his featured equal and ending with the word that the magazine would be moving in a new direction.
A story of societal change, rich in cultural as well as personal history.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-38296-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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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