Painting a life both shallow and deep, painstakingly choreographed and unscripted, Jenner’s candid portrait of a self in the...
A rugged tale of brute beauty and pyrrhic individualism.
When Bruce Jenner took his iconic victory lap around Montreal’s Olympic Stadium on July 30, 1976, he invited the world to witness the zenith of his triumphant transformation from talented small-town athlete to Superman-like decathlete for the ages. Fast-forward nearly 40 years, when he found himself nearly powerless on the side of the road, begging TMZ not to publish word of his tracheal shave that would signal to the world, and especially to those dear to him, an even greater physical transformation he was then desperate to conceal. Shuttling between past and recent watershed moments in this intimate tell-all memoir, Jenner now recounts path-breaking strides and missteps on the road from Bruce, who “existed for sixty-five years,” to Caitlyn, “just going on her second birthday.” With the help of Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Bissinger, who penned the 2015 Vanity Fair feature accompanying Annie Leibovitz’s first portraits of Caitlyn, Jenner explores extraordinary episodes in the years spent attempting to reconcile Bruce’s “public figure” with his “private shadow” as he negotiated multiple marriages, children, and various careers, all while wrestling with the self-described gender dysphoria that led him to identify as female as early as age 10. Referring to his years of Olympic training as the “Grand Diversion” from innate gender issues, the author insists, “Bruce was not a lie. Bruce existed: what I did lie about or at least obfuscate was Caitlyn’s existence.” He describes pivotal moments, such as first wife Chrystie’s 1973 discovery of her husband’s “gender issues,” and he provides insight into the hollow, post-Olympic years spent doing motivational speeches on overcoming the competitor within while sporting “panties and a bra and pantyhose” beneath his business suit.
Painting a life both shallow and deep, painstakingly choreographed and unscripted, Jenner’s candid portrait of a self in the remaking is a marvel to behold.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4555-9675-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
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
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