A graceful, surprisingly tender account of a life lived at the edge of fame.
The “too ordinary” member of a famous Hollywood family recalls her unusual childhood.
By the time she was 16, Huston had already swum with Jack Nicholson, roller-skated with football legend Jim Brown and looked into the legendarily violet eyes of Marlon Brando. Unshakably level-headed, she decided they weren’t violet at all, but rather “bluey-gray.” Her refusal to mythologize the “special” people, including her movie-star sister, Anjelica, sets her book apart from the usual Hollywood memoir. The many brushes with fame came courtesy of her father’s family—the Hustons have produced three generations of Oscar winners—but they came at a price. Born to ballerina Ricki Soma, who was killed in a car accident when Allegra was only four, the author eventually learned that famed director John Huston was not her real father. Her story is about finding her place within this glamorous family, where she was too often an afterthought to the monumentally self-absorbed adults charged with raising her. She reconstructs memories of her mother and connecting with her biological father and his other children. A stunning amount of family drama surrounded her—serial adultery, divorce, alcoholism, child abuse—too much really for a child to bear, but Huston manages to make quiet sense of it all, weathering an emotional neglect that might have destroyed a weaker woman. By 21 she had completed an Oxford degree and embarked on a career in writing and publishing. The final, moving chapter jumps ahead a few years as the author brings together most of the important people in her life to celebrate the christening of her child. The confusion, hurt, jealousy and anger appear to have receded in favor of admirable compassion.
A graceful, surprisingly tender account of a life lived at the edge of fame.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5157-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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