Despite brash touting as being unauthorized, this uninspired biography of the shock-jock is as mild as they come. While Stern is routinely deplored by the chattering classes as a base vulgarian, lately a strong revisionist swell has begun championing him as a vulgarian of rare genius and insight (look for such hallmark cognoscenti approbations as ``Rabelaisian''). Certainly, his achievements have been impressive. Buoyed by his key demographic, men 25 to 34, Stern has conquered almost every medium he's tackled, from radio to cable TV to books. Egocentric as it may be, he can and does justifiably boast of being the ``king of all media.'' Long-running battles with the FCC over indecency have only served to raise his stature further to that of celebrated First Amendment defender. Like many show-biz biographers, Colford (The Rush Limbaugh Story, 1993) provides the prose equivalent of paint- by-numbers—broad clear strokes that reveal only their essential flatness. And given Stern's unabashed, confessional tendencies and self-obsessions, his listeners are already familiar with most of the details presented here. Though Colford claims substantial in- depth research, he manages to conceal most of it effortlessly. In the footsteps of countless newspaper profiles, Colford points out that much of Stern's hyperbolic persona is an act. The loud- mouthed, foul, opinionated, even bigoted DJ is in reality a polite, softspoken family man and devotee of Transcendental Meditation. Colford does a good job, however, at digging into the secretive Stern's finances, revealing that despite his chronic complaints of being underpaid, Stern earns about $8 million a year (this is a man who dropped out of the New York gubernatorial race in part to avoid revealing this figure). For those truly interested in finding out about Stern, his radio show is much more entertaining and revealing than this pallid, perfunctory bio. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (First serial to the Los Angeles Times Magazine)
Pub Date: July 26, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14269-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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