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TINA MODOTTI

A LIFE

Here’s a blockbuster romance waiting to be filmed: Beautiful, gifted Italian immigrant turns Soviet spy and is loved by Edward Weston, befriended by Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo, and, after her mysterious death, mourned by Pablo Neruda. According to Italian writer and journalist Cacucci, Modotti came to the US from Italy in 1913. She was 17, strikingly attractive, and enigmatically compelling to the poet/painter whom she soon married and followed to Los Angeles. Her voluptuous figure gained her femme fatale Hollywood roles, but she abandoned cinema in favor of an intense affair with photographer Weston, who introduced her to the still camera. Modotti and Weston headed for Mexico City, where Tina involved herself in the postrevolutionary artistic and political ferment. In their circle were artists Rivera, Xavier Guerrero, David Siqueiros, and others who influenced her politics and her work. Increasingly sure-footed in her photographs of street life, she “opened the door to social documentary,” according to the author. Nevertheless, her hard-line Communist stance forced her to flee Mexico for Moscow. Giving up photography, Modotti alternated Politburo duties with political espionage, landing in Spain during the Civil War. Reassigned to the US, she was deported to Mexico, where she backed off from the Communist Party, disillusioned by the Hitler/Stalin pact and the first assassination attempt on Trotsky (then in Mexico). She died in 1943 in a taxi, en route home from a dinner party. Was it suicide or assassination? No sure answer. This biography was published in Italy in 1991 and has been translated somewhat stiffly into English by Duncan . More troubling than the stops and starts of the translation are the intermittent “you-are-there” dialogues—between, for instance, Modotti and a Mexican prosecutor, and Modotti and lover Julio Mello. Who was present to record these conversations? A life of mystery, passion, dedication, and talent that begs, “Tell us more.” (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: March 23, 1999

ISBN: 0-312-20036-6

Page Count: 240

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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