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
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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