Exploring her deep bond with the creator of The Twilight Zone, the author delves into her father's writing career, his deep commitment to social justice and her grief following his death.
Rod Serling (1924–1975) served proudly in World War II and then attended college. He began his writing career after winning a prize for a radio-show script, and he became a 1960s icon as host of The Twilight Zone: “the man in the dark suit standing against a dramatically lit set, intoning cautionary observations about human beings, fate, or the universe.” But fame was radically different in those days, his daughter writes; celebrities were less afflicted by “the mayhem, the pandemonium, or the complete and disrespectful lack of privacy that exists now.” During Anne's childhood, the family lived in Los Angeles for the school year and decamped for the summer to a cabin in upstate New York, where everyone could relax. At the end of its third season, The Twilight Zone was cancelled, and Serling began teaching at Antioch College. CBS later resumed the series for two more years, but Serling was less creatively involved with the show, though he still wrote some episodes. His liberal ideas affected his reputation with conservative TV executives, the author argues. Discrimination and prejudice were anathema to Serling, and it infuriated him when story ideas rooted in his principles were shunted aside in favor of simple entertainment. After writing some scripts for the TV show Night Gallery, for example, he complained to Universal Studios, “I have no interest in a series which is purely and uniquely suspenseful but totally uncommentative on anything.” The author deftly utilizes correspondence to illustrate the bumpy interplay between her father’s strong beliefs and the commercial imperatives of network TV, illuminating as well the political and pop culture of the turbulent 1960s. A piquant memoir blending lush memories of a remarkable father and adept analysis of his work.
Pub Date: April 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3615-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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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