Largely scissors-and-paste celebio of Stewart, spiced with two interviews that Pickard, a British film scholar, conducted with the actor over the years. Stewart biographies (e.g., Allen Eyles's James Stewart, 1984, and the two on film—one for PBS's Great Performances, the other for the American Film Institute) all seem to give off the same warm glow, as if each biographer has just been kissed by Kim Novak and Donna Reed while Katharine Hepburn served oolong tea and gingersnaps. But Pickard drives home the thought that, aside from Stewart's humanity and idealism—not to mention his genuine courage as a bomber-group commander leading nearly 20 missions over Germany during WW II—the actor's main qualities, seldom understood by his fans, are his versatility and artistry. Suicidal George Bailey of It's a Wonderful Life is not filibustering Jefferson Smith of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, who is not Charles Lindbergh of The Spirit of St. Louis or the voyeur of Rear Window, and so on. After the war, the honeymoon of Stewart's return to film lasted only a few years before a string of flops told him he'd played out all his rope and needed a new line in acting. Luckily, his first Western (Winchester `73, 1950) was a smash, toughening him up and reviving his career. The great tragedy in Stewart's life, Pickard reminds us, was the death of one of his twin sons in Vietnam. That war also ended Stewart's type of Western, forcing him to turn to two TV series, The Jimmy Stewart Show and Hawkins, that were no better than they had to be. Slim pickings on a tasty bird. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-08828-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
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
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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