An intimate, uplifting account of a profound friendship and a boyish lark that grew into a spectacularly successful...
Playwright and biographer Hotchner (The Good Life According to Hemingway, 2008, etc.) affectionately reflects on his decades-long friendship with iconic actor Paul Newman.
The author and Newman bonded during the production of a 1955 TV play that proved to be a turning point in both their careers—Newman was nervously replacing the recently deceased James Dean in a Hemingway story adapted by Hotchner—and the resulting teasing and competitive friendship endured until the actor’s death in 2008. The bulk of Hotchner’s narrative concerns the establishment of the Newman’s Own line of gourmet foods, begun as a lark by the duo in Newman’s barn, where they mixed up a vat of the actor’s signature salad dressing with a dirty oar. From such humble beginnings grew a philanthropic powerhouse, distributing hundreds of millions of dollars to various charities, despite an army of naysayers and seemingly insurmountable odds. The author stresses the playfulness of Newman’s quixotic desire to enter the food industry, and the competitiveness and breezy optimism that characterized Newman’s attitude toward the project. The pair also established a special summer camp for seriously ill children, again bringing a dauntingly complicated and expensive project to fruition with little more than nerve and contrariness. The Newman that emerges from Hotchner’s remembrances is an immensely likable figure, compulsively unpretentious and self-deprecating, hungry for fun and adventure. There are a few scenes highlighting Newman’s movie-star milieu, including a beer-fueled tennis match with Robert Redford and MPAA head Jack Valenti, and a taste test administered by Newman neighbor Martha Stewart. But the author focuses on the actor away from Hollywood, engaged in his passions for racing, boating and just hanging out and shooting the breeze. Sections on the suicide of Newman’s troubled son and a heartbreaking account of the actor’s failing health add melancholic notes to the story, but Hotchner’s memoir is ultimately an inspirational portrait of an extraordinary man.
An intimate, uplifting account of a profound friendship and a boyish lark that grew into a spectacularly successful enterprise.Pub Date: March 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-53233-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
