Find space on the crowded Chaplin shelf for this perceptive, literate take on the great screen clown.
A fresh entry in the evergreen field of works devoted to Charlie Chaplin.
If ever an artist’s life lent itself to psychoanalysis, it’s Chaplin’s. His alcoholic father abandoned him and his brother when they were children, leaving him in the abject poverty of a London slum with an encephalitic mother who ended up in a madhouse. “We laugh…in order not to weep,” said Chaplin years later. Rather than take the fun out of Chaplin’s comedies with tendentious theorizing, Weissman, a faculty member at the Washington School of Psychiatry, lends dimension to the classics, drawing reasonable connections between Chaplin’s life and art. The author demonstrates Chaplin’s ability to transform family heartbreak into film comedies such as The Gold Rush, Modern Times and City Lights. Equally influential on Chaplin’s art were the early days he spent honing his craft in British music halls. With lean, energetic prose, Weissman ably sidesteps stilted academic writing to bring this colorful theatrical period to life. He offers vivid sketches of the hardships of touring in the hardscrabble provinces and the painstaking, meticulous ways in which Chaplin honed his talents. Childhood pain, the music-hall apprenticeships and the new art of film aligned in Hollywood as Chaplin went to work for director Mack Sennett. Weissman carefully follows the confluence of several artists that led to the creation of Chaplin’s iconic Little Tramp. Throughout the book, the author caps exhaustive sourcing with an overlay of insightful observations about Chaplin’s creative process.
Find space on the crowded Chaplin shelf for this perceptive, literate take on the great screen clown.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55970-892-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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
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
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