An outing of the billionaire closet bisexual by Higham, whose bios include lives of Cary Grant, Brando, Orson Welles, the Duchess of Windsor, and L.B. Mayer, among others. Higham does his research an injustice by insisting on printing much sexual hearsay as fact (and hinting that Hughes died of an AIDS-like disease), especially since he has done as much homework on Hughes's business and monetary activities as he did on Wallis Windsor and Mayer. The first half of Hughes's life fascinates with his immense network of seductions as he forms one movie company to assuage his voyeuristic needs and buys another to continue them- -while also running Hughes Tool, TWA, and other businesses—and meanwhile breaking an around-the-world aircraft speed record and building the gigantic Spruce Goose military transport (a white elephant of no use whatsoever). This is all before his psychic collapse into fear of large-scale germ warfare via Kleenex, a mental illness that Higham suggests Hughes picked up from his mother, a monumental cleanliness nut. As for the bisexual hearsay, Higham says he got it from Lawrence Quirk, nephew of Photoplay publisher James Quirk, who got it straight from Hughes's bisexual uncle Rupert Hughes, who got it from Hughes himself during a confessional outpouring. Higham says that Hughes's ``sexual partners were not so much lovers as hostages, prisoners or victims of his will; he had to dominate in everything.'' The author tells of Hughes's descent into Hollywood S&M, and as for his news about Hughes paying off Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon: It may not be new, but it comes strongly documented. The recluse's last years are...ripe—he even takes to storing his urine in Mason jars. Undeniably a hypnotic portrait of a great American monster.
Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-399-13859-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
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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