Not a great read, then, but fans may be interested.
The life of the actor, best known for his starring role in the long-running sitcom Benson.
The illegitimate son of an abused and emotionally unstable mother, Robert Guillaume was born in 1927 in St. Louis, where he grew up in poverty, raised mostly by his grandmother, a cleaning woman, and got his first taste of performing by singing in the church choir. He’d had a successful career as a stage actor, singer, and comedian, most notably in the revue Jacques Brel Is Alive and Living in Paris, before being offered the part of Benson, the sharp-tongued butler on the comedy Soap, for which he won an Emmy in 1979. The character was later spun off into his own series, which ran for seven seasons on ABC, from 1979 to 1986. When Benson went off the air, Guillaume continued to work steadily, appearing in several short-lived television series and starring in the title role of the Los Angeles production of The Phantom of the Opera. His career almost came to a halt in 1999 when he suffered a minor stroke on the set of the critically acclaimed “dramedy” Sports Night (on which he played producer Isaac Jaffee), an incident that was put into the show’s plotline to avoid writing out the character. Since then the actor has been slowly recovering—hence the reflective mood this autobiography finds him in. Although he’s endured more than his share of hardship—the poverty and racial discrimination of his youth, his stroke, the death of his son Jacques from AIDS—he doesn’t succumb to hand-wringing, and while the prose is often stilted, and the pacing somewhat uneven, he comes across as serious about his craft and candid about the mistakes he’s made along the way.
Not a great read, then, but fans may be interested.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8262-1426-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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