People who love star autobiographies will no doubt find this satisfying, though younger readers, who’ve never heard of Mod...
Predictable memory-tripping by the erstwhile star of Mod Squad.
Lipton, famous for her role as Julie Barnes in Mod Squad, describes a childhood filled with secrets: no one talked about her grandfather’s mistress, a black maid; or the baby who died when a nurse dropped him; or the possible suicide of an uncle; or the abuse Lipton sustained at the hands of her aunt’s husband. But Lipton rose above all these tangles to become a model and actress, starting out with small bit parts, then becoming a household name in Mod Squad. She recounts a heart-wrenching affair with Paul McCartney and a fling with Elvis Presley. Finally, she meets the love of her life, Grammy-winner Quincy Jones. Withstanding criticism from a public uncomfortable with an interracial union, Jones and Lipton married in 1974. They had two children, and Lipton threw herself into motherhood, giving up acting completely. Then, in the mid 1980s, the marriage fell apart. Lipton’s description of the end seems coyly incomplete: the divorce seems to come out of the blue, and Lipton explains only that she “needed spiritual guidance from within” and that “though the karmic cord wouldn’t be cut for years,” the “fourteen-year cycle” of marriage and child-rearing with Jones was over. After leaving him, Lipton returned to acting. Her descriptions of the post-marriage, post-Mod Squad phase of her career are the strongest sections here. The chapter on Twin Peaks, the David Lynch television show with Lipton playing Norma Jennings, is fascinating and passionate. It reads with an immediacy and vigor that much of the rest lacks. Indeed, Lipton leans too often on tired, unimaginative prose (Her “daughters. . . will always be there” for her, “Losing a sibling is devastating”).
People who love star autobiographies will no doubt find this satisfying, though younger readers, who’ve never heard of Mod Squad, are unlikely to pick it up.Pub Date: May 9, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-32413-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
