Book Review: Jean Harlow

Bombshell: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow by David Stenn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


 A fair and balanced overview of her life, the book was not a tell all (in order to harm the star) book.   The book also shared with the reader the age, the star and the sine from all of her abuse.  She was a star looking for someone to admire her for her true Missouri self.  She acted in order to support her dysfunctional mother.  The pressure of her life mounted, from no true father, an overbearing mother, and a sense of being an underdog a midst rabid dobermans.   And in the end she was left alone, a damaged platinum blonde.  She was the sepia goddess in an age of fear. The great depressions was a time when America was waking from the first world war and maturing from a time of magical innocence.

Jean Harlow's life seems to be summed up in the one-hundredth and tenth line of T.S. Eliot's the Wasteland: Footsteps shuffled on the stair Under the firelight under the brush her hair, Spread out in fiery points, Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

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