Equal parts oddly compelling and eye-crossingly dull.
Octogenarian crooner submits his Horatio Alger tale.
In the 1960s, easy-listening icon Andy Williams’s velvety voice and handsome mug became associated with a culturally conservative side of America that never embraced rock ’n’ roll. But as we learn in this surprisingly candid memoir, Williams endured a pre-success hard-knock life that rivaled the squalid upbringings of many country singers or rock stars. Raised during the Great Depression in tiny Wall Lake, Iowa, a pre-adolescent Williams and his brothers were pushed hard by their hyperambitious manager father, singing at local church socials and anywhere else they could find work. Soon the family was living a peripatetic working-class existence, moving to Des Moines, then Chicago, then Los Angeles, doing radio shows and picking up the odd decent-paying gig. In L.A., however, his father’s dogged persistence paid off when he got the brothers bit parts in a few Hollywood films. However, making it as a solo act in the post–World War II entertainment landscape nearly undid the workaholic singer. At his lowest point he was playing dingy nightclubs to little acclaim and sleeping in vermin-ridden flophouses—he once even resorted to eating dog food. Even as he began to have success on television, hosting the Andy Williams Show, while becoming a million-selling recording artist, life was still tough. Two marriages ended in divorce, and one ex-wife, singer Claudine Longet, was later involved in a controversial shooting. The author’s peak years in the late ’60s are the least compelling, as Williams rambles on about the fruits of success: art collecting, investing in Arabian horses, celebrity golf tournaments and run-ins with the Rat Pack, Elvis, John Lennon and seemingly every major or minor showbiz luminary of the day.
Equal parts oddly compelling and eye-crossingly dull.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02117-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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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