Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand
William J. Mann 2012
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt



Summary:

 In 1960, she was a seventeen-year-old Brooklyn kid with plenty of talent but no connections and certainly no money; her mother brought her soup to make sure she stayed fed as she took acting classes and scraped out a living. Just four years later, Barbra Streisand was the top-selling female recording artist in America and the star of one of Broadway’s biggest hits. Now the acclaimed Hollywood biographer William Mann chronicles that dizzying ascent, telling the riveting behind-the-scenes story of how Streisand and her team transformed her from an unknown dreamer into a worldwide superstar. 

Personal Review:
I thought the book was really quite good. But it dragged on. The book itself was over 500 pages. And was repiticious quite often. While it painted a really good picture of Barbra's emotions and ideas it also shared those of the people she knew. It caused me to have great sympathy for her at some points and at others to be like "get over it!" She thinks her mother doesn't love her but that is not the case. While I had a hard time appreciating what her mother did at first I came to really like Barbra's mother. Some of her flames were sort of.... distant and self centered. But the writing was really good. I quite enjoyed reading it. It really made me understand why Streisand is the way she is.

Grade: +++
Book to Read This Week: Below Stairs by Margaret Powell

-MaggieG