A savory treatment of a beloved yet troubled theater legend.
A judicious yet candid biography of Hart (1904–61), the Broadway Prospero who transformed out-of-town dross into opening-night gold—and his own torments into opportunities for success.
Escaping a miserable, poverty-stricken upbringing, Hart achieved celebrity in 1930 with Once in a Lifetime, a Hollywood satire that he co-wrote with George S. Kaufman. He went on to collaborate on seven more shows with Kaufman (including You Can’t Take It With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner), then wrote his own comedies (Light Up the Sky), musicals (Jubilee with Cole Porter, Lady in the Dark with Ira Gershwin and Kurt Weill), and screenplays (Gentleman’s Agreement and A Star Is Born), while also directing (My Fair Lady and Camelot). Bach (Marlene Dietrich, 1992, etc.) relates with aplomb the backstage dramas behind these productions, and is especially good at relating how Hart handled such titanic egos as Alexander Woollcott, Gertrude Lawrence, Rex Harrison, George M. Cohan, and Lerner and Loewe with intelligence, moxie, and charm. But he also explores (with the help of numerous oral histories and interviews with Hart’s associates) the shadows on the other side of Hart’s sunny surface. Hart coped with his manic depression through work, shopping sprees, countless psychiatric sessions, and even shock treatment. With sensitivity, Bach also discusses Hart’s ambivalence about his sexual orientation—fears that did not subside until into his 40s, when he married Kitty Carlisle. In the face of all this, Hart emerges triumphant in Bach’s telling, living “a life of uncommon generosity in an often mean-spirited world, a life more painful than we knew, and maybe a little braver, too.”
A savory treatment of a beloved yet troubled theater legend.Pub Date: April 29, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-44154-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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
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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