Warm, richly researched life of dark-haired, limpid-eyed Linda Darnell, who made her first picture at 15 playing an adult and seemingly kept her face-in-the-twilight flawlessness fresh forever. Darnell was the daughter of hard-drinking, part-Cherokee Pearl Brown Darnell, who was set like steel on making her daughter a movie star. Even as a child, Darnell was so forbiddingly beautiful that she seemed set aside by nature and had few friends. Mother had her out singing and dancing all over Dallas andthough the child did neither wellwinning prizes largely on sheer looks. A screen test at 15 eventually landed her the lead in Hotel for Women (1939), and her third picture, Star Dust (1940), was autobiographical, about her discovery by Hollywood. Still in her teens, she played against her idol, Tyrone Power, making some of her best films with him while going to school on the Fox lot. Whether this forced bloom was the cause or not, she never had a menstrual period throughout her life, and felt her beauty was a fraud. Her first husband, a 42-year-old cameraman she married at 19, taught her to knock back whiskey and by her early 20s she was an alcoholic, as tough and hard-swearing as her outrageous mother. Her greatest successes were Forever Amber, A Letter to Three Wives, and Preston Sturgess's original Unfaithfully Yours. Her big love was for Joseph L. Manckiewicz, who wrote and directed her best worka six-year affair, although Joe was married, as was Linda. By 31, she'd been cast aside by Hollywood. She spent her last decade in ever more desperate show- biz turns, went broke, never rose above the bottle battle, died in a housefire at 41 just after watching a midnight rerun of Star Dust on TV. Well done, quite believable, in some ways a model celebrity bio in its method, although the writing is not distinguished and any study of Darnell's acting talentslimited though they wereis scanted.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8061-2327-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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