Come for the LA intrigue; stay for the surprising moral of the story.
Hero worship meets compelling biography in Vanity Fair contributing editor Anolik’s (Dark Rooms, 2015) nonfiction debut.
A cultural fixture in Los Angeles in the 1960s and ’70s, Eve Babitz (b. 1943) eclipsed the label of groupie. She was a socialite who managed to intertwine herself with Steve Martin, Warren Zevon, Jim Morrison, Yoko Ono, and Andy Warhol, a Hollywood High graduate–turned-author whose teen years defined her writing. She was well-known but also dismissed by some, including novelist Julia Whedon: “I discern in Babitz the soul of a columnist, the flair of a caption writer, the sketchy intelligence of a woman stoned on trivia.” However, Anolik shows that Whedon was shortchanging the woman who famously posed nude over a chessboard with Marcel Duchamp (he was clothed). The author is entirely up front about her obsession with her subject. A love for Babitz’s writing turned into a deep dive to uncover the woman who pitched her first novel, Travel Broadens, in 1961 to Catch-22 author Joseph Heller with a letter that read, “Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked eighteen-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.” As Anolik shares, the provocative message was classic Babitz: “playing the sexy, boobalicious girl.” That character certainly made a significant impression during her heyday, but it was Babitz’s style and fictive memoirs that defined her as something of a female Hunter S. Thompson, a drugged-out sex kitten with brains. Throughout the book, Anolik shares deep cuts from Babitz’s writing and influence over the major players of the era. But as with any dishy tale, there are times when the narrative gets caught in its own name-dropping cyclone and feels just as shallow as some of the stars it portrays. Fortunately, the author counters this problem with a poignant rendering of Babitz’s tragedy: a freak fire that destroyed her once-renowned beauty—but not her chutzpah.
Come for the LA intrigue; stay for the surprising moral of the story.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2579-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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