Shirley Temple Black

I watched a not especially good movie from 1934 a while ago that had a plot moppet clearly modeled on Shirley Temple, so that sent me down a wiki hole about Shirley Temple’s life. And—holy crap, that woman was amazing. The child stardom was far from the most interesting part of her life. She was ambassador to Ghana and to Czechoslavakia. She was the first female Chief Protocol Officer of the US, which means she planned Carter’s inauguration.

So I went looking for books about her. She’s got a memoir that looks awesome called “Child Star,” but that only covers her years in Hollywood. From the quotes from it I read, she was a woman with a lot of insight about her life and experiences. I don’t read that much anymore so I will probably not get to this book, but it’s going on the list.

But since that didn’t cover anything after Hollywood, I went looking for biographies. There are several, but none look particularly good. One, a 500-pager, has these very helpful reviews on Amazon:

“This book was very interesting about Shirley Temple. I had no idea that she had done so much acting at such a young age.” [What? What? If you didn’t know she was a child actor, why are you reading this???]
“It’s about Shirley temple.”
“Book is fine but didn't work for us. Needed a book for my 7yo read for a report and this was MUCH TOO advanced. It's a huge book with lots of info”
“I have a stack of books and this has been added” – Four stars
“Thank God she'd finally dead!” [Who…who out there hates Shirley Temple that much?]