Reading to savor.
Distinguished celebrity biographer and Vanity Fair contributing editor Bosworth (Marlon Brando, 2001, etc.) recounts the life story of an American icon in all its heady—and at times, unabashedly scandalous—glory.
Ten years in the making, the book is based in exhaustive and meticulous research as well as a friendship the author began with Fonda in the late 1960s when they were both students studying at the Actors Studio in New York. Bosworth divides Fonda’s life into five distinctive stages, naming each after the “archetype” Fonda embodied during those phases: daughter, actress, movie star/sex symbol, political activist and workout guru/tycoon wife. With consummate skill and insight, the author follows Fonda through a childhood that included tortured relationships with an emotionally unavailable father, Henry Fonda, and a troubled mother who committed suicide at age 42. As young adult, Fonda’s dynamism drove her toward defining herself as an actress-artist (rather than her father’s actress daughter). At the same time, a need for quasi-paternal control caused her to fall into Svengali-like relationships with men—most notably, director Roger Vadim and activist Tom Hayden. In the early ’70s, Fonda’s rebelliousness caused her to move toward the political left and speak out against the Vietnam War. As a way to help fund Hayden’s political ambitions, Fonda began a workout studio in the ’80s that evolved into a multimillion-dollar industry. No longer the sexpot, she was now an Academy Award–winning feminist-actress who took pride in “empowering women to be in charge of their bodies.” Bosworth’s coverage of Fonda’s apparent backslide into the Stepford-esque wife of media tycoon Ted Turner is not nearly as in-depth as that she gives to the other phases of her colorfully tumultuous history. But this does not take away from her total effort, which is as epic as the life she chronicles.
Reading to savor.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-15257-8
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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