Dual biography of Lucy and Desi by the author of Natalie & R.J.: A Hollywood Love Story (1988), Cary Grant: A Touch of Elegance (1987), etc. Despite his stylelessness, Harris performs a thorough job on the lives of TV's greatest comedy team, although he does not offer complete cast listings, show dates, or titles. What he does capture well is Desi's solemn patience as he explains things to Lucy: Desi's Cuban tones enliven every page he's on—but then so does Lucy's amused tolerance with Desi. The two first met in the RKO commissary when Desi was a bombshell Broadway success at 23 and Lucy at 29 was grinding out six musicals a year. Lucy grew up in a suburb of Jamestown, N.Y., where she became known as the ``Jamestown hussy'' because of her raccoon coat and flapper's galoshes. After a few ``missing years,'' about which there are dark hints, she landed a job as a Goldwyn Girl at MGM. Meanwhile, Desi grew up spoiled rotten as the son of the mayor of Santiago, Cuba. At 15, he was welcomed as a regular at a fastidious brothel. Moving to Miami, he landed a job as a guitarist at the Roney Plaza, became a featured singer with Xavier Cugat's band, then formed his own band and had his breakthrough with the conga. After he and Lucy eloped, they soon found themselves separated by film work, and his infidelities led to her filing for divorce before their fourth anniversary. They became reconciled, but Desi's gambling, girls, and booze never stopped, and life became hell on earth. The birth of Ricky, Jr., on I Love Lucy, timed to the birth of Desi, Jr., in real life, drew unbelievable ratings and had the country crazed. The final I Love Lucy brought on national mourning. Lucy's second marriage, to Gary Morton, outlasted her 19 years with Desi, with Gary calling his friend Desi his husband-in-law. Amusing, sometimes moving. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs- -not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-671-74709-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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