Despite its title, the aging enfant terrible of America takes few hits from the friendly fire of this overly authorized biography. In order to secure Stone's cooperation, Riordan (coauthor, Break on Through, 1991, etc.) allowed the filmmaker to both see and edit his quotes. Perhaps it isn't just Stone-style paranoia, then, that gives the reader the feeling that this book isn't the full story. Riordan airs most of the negatives—Stone's compulsive womanizing, years of drug abuse, his fierce unpleasantness and hyperbole—but invariably excuses or diminishes them with an apologist's zeal. There is also a dÇjÖ vu quality to much of the material, a didn't-I-read-that-somewhere-in-a-magazine feeling. Riordan does do a credible job of illuminating Stone's directorial methods as well as his many driving paradoxes. Here is a bacchanalian ``wild man'' who, nonetheless, runs his sets with boot-camp precision, invariably bringing his films in on time and on budget. Stone may also regularly attack the establishment, yet his sensibilities haven't prevented him from working deep within the Hollywood studio system (and making a fortune). Riordan ties these contradictions to Stone's privileged but miserable upbringing and his military service in Vietnam. Certainly, Stone is convinced he has something important to say. And so, like Stanley Kramer in the '50s, he makes ``message films''—impassioned attempts to grapple with big issues. But Stone is far superior to Kramer in his visceral command of film language. As actress Joan Chen put it, ``Though he can be very strong, and you feel like he's hitting you over the head with what he wants to convey, he doesn't lose his sense of poetry.'' Long after the message is outdated, it will be this poetry that keeps Stone's films fresh and alive. Riordan's biography has few such saving graces. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-7868-6026-X
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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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