Pleasant but lightweight life of fat Ralph Kramden's creator, by the author of Salman Rushdie (1990), James Baldwin (1989), etc. Weatherby apparently twisted a scotch bottle dry with Gleason a number of times, starting back in Gleason's heyday, 1961, when the comedian was already questioning the value of gaining the world and would solemnly quote Shakespeare at length. Orson Welles dubbed Gleason ``the Great One'' and hoped someday to direct him as Falstaff, while Gleason tried to talk Welles into making Citizen Gleason. Weatherby has nailed the right interviews (Art Carney, Audrey Meadows, Milton Berle, Frank Sinatra, Mickey Rooney, Paul Newman, and others), but even so one can feel paste at the joins. Abandoned at nine by his father and an orphan at 19, Bushwick-born Gleason was stage-struck at seven, working as a stand-up comedian in his teens. Early marriage to a fellow Catholic he could not divorce brought him two daughters and long pain. Gleason bloomed in bistros, especially Toots Shor's, and always picked up the check, even when broke. Ralph Kramden, with his Depression-era kitchen, was the longest-running in a stable of Gleason creations, and when the comedian decided to stop doing Kramden at the height of his glory, CBS was stunned. Gleason said he feared running dry, as good an explanation as any. As a character actor, he enjoyed a mostly successful film career (e.g., as pool-shark Minnesota Fats in The Hustler) and did some hit stage turns. Late in life, the release of 120 ``lost'' early episodes of The Honeymooners he'd kept in an air-conditioned vault brought him renewed fame. Gleason died of cancer in 1987 at age 71. Gleason is an ever-compelling major comedian who still awaits the serious biographical attention given Keaton, Chaplin, and Laurel and Hardy.
Pub Date: April 6, 1992
ISBN: 0-88687-655-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
A welcome addition to the literature on immigration told by an author who understands the issue like few others.
The debut book from “one of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard.”
In addition to delivering memorable portraits of undocumented immigrants residing precariously on Staten Island and in Miami, Cleveland, Flint, and New Haven, Cornejo Villavicencio, now enrolled in the American Studies doctorate program at Yale, shares her own Ecuadorian family story (she came to the U.S. at age 5) and her anger at the exploitation of hardworking immigrants in the U.S. Because the author fully comprehends the perils of undocumented immigrants speaking to journalist, she wisely built trust slowly with her subjects. Her own undocumented status helped the cause, as did her Spanish fluency. Still, she protects those who talked to her by changing their names and other personal information. Consequently, readers must trust implicitly that the author doesn’t invent or embellish. But as she notes, “this book is not a traditional nonfiction book….I took notes by hand during interviews and after the book was finished, I destroyed those notes.” Recounting her travels to the sites where undocumented women, men, and children struggle to live above the poverty line, she reports her findings in compelling, often heart-wrenching vignettes. Cornejo Villavicencio clearly shows how employers often cheat day laborers out of hard-earned wages, and policymakers and law enforcement agents exist primarily to harm rather than assist immigrants who look and speak differently. Often, cruelty arrives not only in economic terms, but also via verbal slurs and even violence. Throughout the narrative, the author explores her own psychological struggles, including her relationships with her parents, who are considered “illegal” in the nation where they have worked hard and tried to become model residents. In some of the most deeply revealing passages, Cornejo Villavicencio chronicles her struggles reconciling her desire to help undocumented children with the knowledge that she does not want "kids of my own." Ultimately, the author’s candor about herself removes worries about the credibility of her stories.
A welcome addition to the literature on immigration told by an author who understands the issue like few others.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-399-59268-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Aunty Entity and the lady who showed Mick Jagger his best moves will delight in Turner’s lightly spun memoir.
Rock-’n’-soul icon Turner is happy at last, and she wants the world to know it.
The love story of the title is specific: The 78-year-old singer has been with her German mate for 33 years, and though bits and pieces of her body have been failing and misbehaving—she recounts a stroke, kidney failure, cancer, and other maladies—her love is going strong. It’s also generalized: Turner, born Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee, is enchanted by the world, from her childhood countryside to the shores of Lake Zurich, where she has lived nearly half her life. There was another love story, of course, the one that fans will know and lament: her marriage to the drug-addicted, philandering Ike Turner, of whom she writes, pointedly, “at this point in my life, I’ve spent far more time without Ike than with him.” The author emerges from these pages as self-aware and hungry for knowledge and experience. Who knew that she was a dedicated reader of Dante as well as a “favorite aunt” of Keith Richards and a practitioner of Buddhism of such long standing that Ike himself demanded that she lose her shrine? The gossip is light, though she’s clear on the many reasons she broke away from Ike. She’s also forgiving, and as for others in her circle over the years, she calls Mel Gibson “Melvin” because of his “little boy quality,” though she doesn’t approve of certain bad behavior of his. Mostly, her portraits of such figures as David Bowie and Bryan Adams are affectionate, and the secrets she reveals aren’t terribly shocking. Those fishnet stockings and short skirts, she lets slip, were more practical than prurient, the stockings running less easily than nylons and the short skirts “easier for dancing because they left my legs free."
Fans of Aunty Entity and the lady who showed Mick Jagger his best moves will delight in Turner’s lightly spun memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9824-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2018
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