Not nearly so charming as the lobbies Lapidus designs.
An architect who created a casino for The Donald in Atlantic City and a hotel for Donald Duck fans at Disney World reviews his life and decides it’s been awesome.
The 70-year-old Lapidus’s first book proves that gifts in one art are not necessarily transferable. He begins with a funny, Larry McMurtry-esque sentence—“Mrs. Axelrod wanted an ocean view from her bidet”—but the elevator of eloquence drops precipitously thereafter. Nor is the text particularly well organized. Mrs. Axelrod’s bidet is followed by a scattershot resume of his career and some equally scattershot comments about the portrayal of architects in movies before the author gets down to business with a phone call from Donald Trump (whose posterior this lipsticky text decorates throughout) and the subsequent building of Trump Plaza. Then he moves back to confess some boyhood anxieties. Dad, aka Morris Lapidus, the far-more-famous-than-Alan architect who designed Miami’s Fontainebleau Hotel, wasn’t very warm. The author skims lightly over military service and the Columbia University School of Architecture to spend more time on the apprentice years with Morris, who didn’t like to praise his son. Alan’s first major project in the late 1960s was a huge swimming pool in Bedford-Stuyvesant; he was pleased that his work, not Dad’s, got kudos from Ada Louise Huxtable, the formidable architecture critic for the New York Times. But apparently public projects weren’t profitable enough, so off he went to the Caribbean, where he made his bones with beautiful buildings that actually functioned well. Then to Atlantic City for casinos, to Disney and New York for hotels. Later came some financial setbacks (bankruptcy), the devastating 9/11 attack and some interesting projects in Cuba and Moscow and Brazil that didn’t always work out. The author is certainly comfortable in the world of fat bank accounts and soaring egos; readers may wonder about his values as he gleefully describes the way casinos seduce customers.
Not nearly so charming as the lobbies Lapidus designs.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36166-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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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