by Richard A. Lertzman & William J. Birnes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 20, 2015
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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
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