A warm, detailed memoir that is a record of the author’s truest love–the theater.
A charming memoir by a 76-year-old actor who began his career alongside Claude Rains in Darkness at Noon, worked as a talent agent for 22 years and eventually returned to the stage and screen.
The book is as appealingly self-deprecating as its title. Seff captions an early photo of himself, “the young actor, 20, vacuous,” and finishes a story about touring a play for the USO during World War II by writing “it’s a miracle that we won the war anyway.” Never a star, Seff was a sensitive and witty observer of the people around him, from Chita Rivera and Bob Fosse to Martin Scorsese. (In Taxi Driver, Seff played one of Travis Bickle’s customers, but writes that he never really met Robert De Niro: “It is clear that when he’s into a character, he is INTO him, and no polite ‘hellos’ are going to interfere.”) Colorful but never gossipy, the book is also a trove of theater trivia–for example, the story of how Rex Harrison influenced the title of My Fair Lady, by bellowing “It cannot say REX HARRISON in Lady Liza on a marquee!” Following the arc of his life, Seff describes changes in the acting industry, from the emergence of television and the domination of Hollywood to the popularization of method acting. More touching are the author’s sincere stories about his personal life, from growing up as a Brooklyn kid who saved his nickels to go to the movies to how he became a mature gay actor. His sentimental education, introduction to New York’s gay society and reminisces about his loves are sweet, refreshing intermissions between chapters about his professional life as an actor and agent.
A warm, detailed memoir that is a record of the author’s truest love–the theater.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4257-3934-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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