Martin’s star quality prevails.
Affectionate but not airbrushed portrait of the Broadway diva who got her first big break with a naughty Cole Porter song but flew into legend in a children’s classic.
Davis (Van Johnson: MGM’s Golden Boy, 2001, etc.) draws upon a full shelf of oral histories he collected from various theater artists to tell the story of Mary Martin (1913–90). A stage-struck Texas girl who didn’t let a teenage marriage (or the resulting son, Larry Hagman) stand in her way, she was undeterred even by a humiliating 1935 rejection from theater impresario Billy Rose. In a moment worthy of Busby Berkeley, Martin told her mother, “I’m going back to California and I’m going to have a career.” She copped leads in several tepid movie musicals, but the camera did not love her. She turned to Broadway, which loved her from the moment she did a striptease while singing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in 1938. Her signature roles, in South Pacific, Peter Pan and The Sound of Music, were more demure, but she established an intense rapport with the audience in whatever she did. Clearly a Martin fan—indeed, he spent some time with her on the ranch in Brazil to which she more or less retired in the ’70s—Davis summons scores of anecdotes and testimonials demonstrating that she could be warm, generous and supremely professional. He also acknowledges that she could be controlling and temperamental, most notably during tryouts for the flop musical Jennie in 1963. Micromanaging every aspect of her career, second husband Richard Halliday irritated and frequently outraged nearly everyone in Martin’s life, including her semi-estranged son Hagman. In addition, Davis reports, Halliday was a mean-tempered drug and alcohol abuser and a closet homosexual. As for Martin’s alleged romances with Jean Arthur and Janet Gaynor, the author declares that the exact nature of those relationships is “unknown.”
Martin’s star quality prevails.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8061-3905-0
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
A vivid, gut-wrenching, beautifully written, memorable book.
With the assistance of New York Times Magazine writer Corbett, Lindhout, who was held hostage in Somalia for more than a year, chronicles her harrowing ordeal and how she found the moral strength to survive.
In 2008, Lindhout, after working as a cocktail waitress to earn travel money, was working as a freelance journalist. In an attempt to jump-start her fledgling career, she planned to spend 10 days in Mogadishu, a “chaotic, anarchic, staggeringly violent city.” She hoped to look beyond the “terror and strife [that] hogged the international headlines” and find “something more hopeful and humane running alongside it.” Although a novice journalist, she was an experienced, self-reliant backpacker who had traveled in Afghanistan and Pakistan. She hired a company to provide security for her and her companion, the Australian photographer Nigel Brennan, but they proved unequal to the task. Their car was waylaid by a gunman, and the group was taken captive and held for ransom. Her abductors demanded $2 million, a sum neither family could raise privately or from their governments. Negotiations played out over 15 months before an agreement for a much smaller sum was reached. The first months of their captivity, until they attempted an escape, were difficult but bearable. Subsequently, they were separated, chained, starved and beaten, and Lindhout was repeatedly raped. Survival was a minute-by-minute struggle not to succumb to despair and attempt suicide. A decision to dedicate her life to humanitarian work should she survive gave meaning to her suffering. As she learned about the lives of her abusers, she struggled to understand their brutality in the context of their ignorance and the violence they had experienced in their short lives. Her guards were young Muslim extremists, but their motive was financial. Theirs was a get-rich scheme that backfired. “Hostage taking is a business, a speculative one,” Lindhout writes, “fed by people like me—the wandering targets, the fish found out of water, the comparatively rich moving against a backdrop of poor.”
A vivid, gut-wrenching, beautifully written, memorable book.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4560-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
A memoir of sorts that blurs the boundary between the personal and the universal.
An American poet of Japanese descent illuminates the tensions that exploded with World War II and the aftershocks within his family.
By the time Shimoda (The Desert, 2018, etc.) came to know his grandfather, the latter was suffering from Alzheimer’s, and thus it was only after his death that the author began to untangle the narrative of his life as a citizen of one country living in another. The resonance of the story that he pieces together, through pilgrimages back to Japan and across the United States, extends well beyond a single family or ethnicity to the soul of his own native country, where “white settlers were the original aliens. They sought to diffuse their alienation, by claiming the land and controlling the movement and rights of the people for whom the land was not alien, but ancestral.” Shimoda’s grandfather was conceived in Honolulu and born in Japan, and he crossed the ocean to Seattle as a 9-year-old boy, without the rest of his family. World War II turned him into an “enemy alien,” though, as the author writes, “he was not born an enemy alien. He was made into an enemy alien. The first (alien) phase was immigration. The third (enemy) phase was the attack on Pearl Harbor. The second phase was the transition. Which was, for a Japanese man, ineligible for citizenship, compulsory.” He was a trained photographer, and by all evidence, a very good and sensitive one, but the main offense on which he was initially incarcerated was possessing a camera. Shimoda wades through memories and dreams; lives and graves that have no names documented; unspeakable horrors committed by the country where his grandfather lived on the people of his native country; and the attempts to memorialize what is too graphically terrible to remember. By the end, writes the author, “I was just learning how to see.”
A memoir of sorts that blurs the boundary between the personal and the universal.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-87286-790-1
Page Count: 186
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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