A comprehensive portrait of Mickey the screw-up; those wanting a more considered portrait of the artist will be disappointed.
The scuzzy life and desperate times of a movie icon.
Lertzman and Birnes’ (Dr. Feelgood: The Shocking Story of the Doctor Who May Have Changed History by Treating and Drugging JFK, Marilyn, Elvis, and Other Prominent Figures, 2013, etc.) biography of Hollywood legend Mickey Rooney (1920-2014) is a largely superficial and sordid take on the entertainer’s long career. The authors scrupulously tabulate all of the divorces, affairs, and financial disasters, but the book fails to illuminate Rooney the man or the incandescent talent that made him a teenage icon and enduring showbiz figure. Part of this is Rooney’s fault: an inveterate fabulist, the actor’s oft-contradictory reminiscences are a confusion of self-aggrandizing anecdotes and garbled grudges. What does emerge clearly is a damning portrait of Rooney—who was a paragon of youthful virtue after appearing in the family-friendly Andy Hardy movie series—as a witless performing savant, ruled by boundless appetites for sex, gambling, booze, and pills, incapable of maintaining personal relationships or mastering the most basic practices of financial responsibility. The authors pay lip service to Rooney’s talent without satisfactorily analyzing what made it so uniquely resonant, and they seem as nonplussed as their interview subjects as to who Rooney was under the bluster and makeup. Readers seeking salacious Hollywood gossip will find a surfeit of tawdry material, including shocking accounts of the adult Rooney’s sexual encounters with the underage likes of Lana Turner and Elizabeth Taylor. The authors do provide some context for Rooney’s monstrous personal behavior: brought up on burlesque stages by dissolute parents (his overbearing stage mother occasionally supplemented their income with prostitution), Rooney was brutally overworked and financially exploited by family, movie studio executives, and untrustworthy business partners. Still, without a richer understanding of Rooney the artist and of the significance of his contributions to the entertainment industry, the whole business leaves behind a foul taste.
A comprehensive portrait of Mickey the screw-up; those wanting a more considered portrait of the artist will be disappointed.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0096-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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