Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Who Killed Sal Mineo Hardcover – January 1, 1982
- Print length318 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSimon & Schuster
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 1982
- ISBN-100671610090
- ISBN-13978-0671610098
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Product details
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster (January 1, 1982)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 318 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0671610090
- ISBN-13 : 978-0671610098
- Item Weight : 4 ounces
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,267,699 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #27,042 in Actor & Entertainer Biographies
- #178,111 in American Literature (Books)
- #246,294 in Mysteries (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Susan Braudy is a Pulitzer nominated author, journalist, and former Vice President of East Coast Production at Warner Brothers. She was one of the first editors of the student/faculty magazine The New Journal at Yale. She's currently a member of that magazine's advisory board. She is best known as the author of two non-fiction books, Between Marriage and Divorce: A Woman's Diary (1975) and Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left (2003).
She received a Cum Laude degree from Bryn Mawr College in the early 1960s, then attended University of Pennsylvania and Yale University (where she studied philosophy).
Braudy's father worked for the Philadelphia Housing Authority and actively supported local artists. He was Vice President of the American Jewish Committee. His Master's thesis at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania became the book Technological Unemployment, an early look at how advances in technology were replacing human labor. He also wanted to be a writer and Braudy believes this may be the reason she became a writer. Braudy's mother taught history at Germantown High School and became a reading supervisor. Braudy now lives with Joe Weintraub and two dogs, Tootsie and Snickers.
Braudy has written for the New York Times, Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly, The Huffington Post, Vanity Fair, Ms. Magazine, New York Magazine and The New Journal. She has also taught writing at Brooklyn College.
She was a judge for the 2006 Lukas Prize, an award from the Columbia University Journalism School given annually to recognize excellence in book-length investigative journalism.
In 1981, Braudy was appointed as the Vice President of East Coast Production at Warner Brothers. She also worked as Vice President of Michael Douglas's Stonebridge Production Company for three years from 1986-1989. She was hired by Francis Ford Coppola, Jerry Bruckheimer, Martin Scorsese, and Oliver Stone to write screenplays.
Her research for a piece on paperback auctions, published in The New York Times, was used by the Federal Trade Commission to institute and win an anti-trust suit against the high-bidder in a multimillion dollar paperback rights auction.
Her two blogs are Manhattan Voyeur and Writers Celebrate Writing.
She counts as her mentors Gloria Steinem, who encouraged her to express her female voice; Daniel Yergin, who taught her the value of infinite research; Michael Douglas, who taught her that glamor isn't glamorous; Michael Wolff, who taught her the music of the New York hustle; Marshall Brickman, who taught her about heartbreak on the fast track; Woody Allen, who taught her his artistic credo, "Turn pain into cash"; and Leo Braudy, who gave her Joan Didion's personal essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
Customer reviews
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star5 star0%45%0%16%39%0%
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star4 star0%45%0%16%39%45%
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star3 star0%45%0%16%39%0%
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star2 star0%45%0%16%39%16%
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star1 star0%45%0%16%39%39%
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
It may have been the times--the early years of the chilling reports about a "gay plague"--but I remember think what a refreshing drink of water this book would be in the desert of information surrounding Sal's death. I will say up front that I did not get what I was hoping for. I believe I was hoping for a book which would give the low-down on Sal Mineo's life and death ala Jackie Suzanne. Instead, I was drawn into the story of a reporter and her unexpected love affair as a result of her assignment to write a small on-location piece concerning the famous actor's murder.
I found myself wondering at times where the mystery which was unfolding around the principals would lead, and especially how it would illuminate the star's demise, but in the end the bittersweet tale left me strangely satisfied, but also angry and in tears--just as did the real-life event.
I real life, the death of Sal Mineo seemed so pointless and shrouded. In her fiction, Ms. Bundy lifted the shroud and showed how without purpose it surely was. Still, I kept hoping Susan had another equally imaginative and moving story to tell. Still waiting, Susan...Susan?
What is sad is not Mineo's life--he was a millionare twice over by the age of 18 and was twice nominated for the Oscar and once for the Emmy by the age of 21--but that both master Marmoset and author Susan Braudy chose to discard the facts in favor of their own, far less interesting inventions.
Plodding and unclever,the book holds no surprises and works neither as a mystery nor as a romance. Strangely Braudy, a journalist who wrote about the murder herself, has discounted some of the fascinating details that still surround the Mineo tragedy in order to focus on more mundane ones of her own invention.
She has, for instance, given him pedophillic tendancies. At a party crowded with twenty-somethings, she shows him preoccupied with the beautiful "puppy bodies" surrounding him. (In fact, Mineo's most famous partner was Rock Hudson, a couple of decades his senior.) And while the real Mineo was, among other things, a bodybuilder and artists' model, Braudy has two of her characters looking askance of photos of him in the nude while one pronounces him "no bathing beauty." But far worse from a mystery reader's standpoint is that Braudy's reporter-heroine shows no great insight or resourcefulness when it comes to solving the crime, instead choosing to spend her time being romanced by one of Mineo's bisexual friends.
Although I can't recommend Braudy's work, those who are knowledgeable about Mineo's life and death may get a chuckle from the sequence in which director Nick Ray laments how James Dean "turned" Mineo gay while the two were making "Rebel Without A Cause." This in spite of Gore Vidal's observation that it was Ray himself--the real Ray, not Braudy's version--who was "openly having an affair" with the adolescent Sal.
Berkeley Hunt