The retired actor muses with humble precision on the little details of his life; the results are sometimes mundane, often witty, and occasionally transcendent. Readers of Guinness’s previously published diary (My Name Escapes Me, 1997) might expect more of the same, but the new volume is subtly different. The previous book was a traditional diary with clearly marked dates; this one has few dates, instead meandering like a stream-of-consciousness novel, or, as Guinness puts it, “a sort of sluggish river.” Though Guinness begins with an eye operation in August 1996, at age 82, the bulk of the journal records events from March 1997 to late 1998, with frequent digressions into the past. We hear about the books he reads (Trollope, Piers Paul Read); the plays, movies, and television he sees (“Loved a recent TV programme on ravens”). He comments on Tony Blair’s election as prime minister, Princess Diana’s death, President Clinton and “That Woman.” We learn about his travels, his pets, his antipathy for Star Wars, and how difficult it is to poach an egg. Through it all, in a manner reminiscent of his master, Montaigne, he weaves philosophical musings and memories of his long, rich career as an actor, often through segues entertaining in their audacity’such as the one leading from a new mobile telephone to a disquisition on technical jargon to a memory of actress Coral Browne skating past an exhibitionist. Some details are tiresome enough to encourage skipping, but the skipper may miss a gem—like Marlene Dietrich’s annual New Year’s Eve “assignment . . . with a well-set-up gentleman from outer space.” Worse, one might overlook the fascinating way in which details build into themes and themes into a vision—of the nature of acting, the “humiliations of age,” and the layered meanings of the old poster phrase “Positively Final Appearance.” At its worst quotidian, at its best high art, from an actor who has earned the name of writer.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88800-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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
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