A fascinating, unsentimental account of a be-careful-what-you-wish-for romance.
The long-suffering wife of Marvin Gaye (1939-1984) tells the story of her turbulent relationship with the legendary soul singer.
Gaye’s debut memoir, a faithful recollection of life with a difficult superstar, is as frustrating as it is compulsively readable. On one level, it’s yet another tell-all confessional from someone who fell into the trap of loving an artist primarily through the idealized image his work publicly projected. But what separates this memoir from so many other cookie-cutter memoirs about celebrity romances gone wrong is that the author is so deeply in touch with her own flaws and vulnerabilities. A girlhood crush on budding superstar Marvin quickly expanded into something more when she met the soft-spoken musician through a friend of her mother’s, who was Marvin’s producer at the time. Besides the initial offbeat love triangle that the teenage Jan found herself in—Marvin was 33 years old and married to a 51-year-old at the time—she was getting involved with someone who had been the product of a profoundly warped household. After a torrid initial romance with her musical hero, the author found herself in the throes of marriage and motherhood, desperate to keep Marvin’s increasingly flagging attention away from other women. As their relationship progressed to rockier, more adult stages—always accompanied by copious amounts of marijuana and cocaine—her psychological dependence on Marvin only grew, while Marvin’s drug-crazed behavior became increasingly unhinged and unpredictable, right up until he was tragically shot dead in an argument with his father. Gaye's explicitly confessional account of her doomed uphill struggle to stay with Marvin is a prime example of how obsessive celebrity worship can so easily (and dangerously) masquerade as enduring love.
A fascinating, unsentimental account of a be-careful-what-you-wish-for romance.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-213551-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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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