On the B-list, as showbiz memoirs go, but entertaining enough.
Longtime agent/manager Gordon, whose clients and confidants have ranged from Teddy Pendergrass to Roger Vergé, tells all.
It’s not all golf and heart attacks in the glitzy world of showbiz, to say nothing of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, though all those things certainly figure in close proximity in Gordon’s memoir. Tellingly, the story begins with sex and drugs all rolled up in a singular person, when the naïve kid arrives in Hollywood from New York and, having dropped acid, busts up what he thinks is a rape only to be told not at all gently by Janis Joplin that the rough and tumble out by the pool is deliberate. Enter Jimi Hendrix and Bobby Neuwirth and Frank Zappa and a succession of Los Angeles machers who take a shine to the kid and point him toward the lucrative world of artist management. The sentimental education came with plenty of raps on the knuckles, as when Gordon briefly managed an up-and-coming English band called Pink Floyd only to lose the quartet over an unpaid gig, at which Jerry Wexler schooled him: “The three most important things a manager does are, number one, get the money. Number two, always remember to get the money. Number three, never forget to always remember to get the money.” Money is a theme and a minor obsession here, but some sunlight creeps through that wall of green: Don Ho turns out to be a nice guy, Alice Cooper and Groucho Marx unlikely bedfellows, Timothy Leary may not be the fellow you’d want to leave alone with your food but a mensch. For his part, Gordon, who certainly has tales to tell, comes off as a blowhard on one page and a meditative beachcomber on the next even as his indifferently written narrative careens between dressing rooms and green rooms, rockers and foodies.
On the B-list, as showbiz memoirs go, but entertaining enough.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-235595-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Anthony Bourdain/Ecco
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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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