The fabulous friends of film producer Deutsch, who clearly has lived a dream life. In 1924, nine-year-old Deutsch, grandson of the chairman of Sears, Roebuck and Col, was the chosen victim for the crime of the century when his Chicago neighbors, Nietzschean homosexuals Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, set out to perform an untraceable murder. Deutsch however had to go to the dentist after school, and so young Bobby Franks was murdered in his place. Since then Deutsch's life has been equally charmed. He met studio head Dore Schary at a party, was told by Schary he'd make a good producer, and soon found himself producing B-pictures for MGM. Which brings up the three Barrymores, all of whom he worked with at one time or another. But then he also must tell us about arranging Joe Louis's last championship fight before Louis's induction into the Army for WW II. And about ten years of high times at the Frank Sinatra compound at Palm Springs, with Frank as the world' greatest host. And about Armand's long friendships with Robert Taylor and with his favorite actor, the alcoholic Louis Calhern, for whom he produced The Magnificent Yankee, and about his long ties with Billy Wilder, art collector and compulsive shopper; his great friendship with billionaire art collector Walter Annenberg; his producing chores with young Nancy Davis and later annual parties with the Reagans; his world travels with sunny punster/publisher Bennett Cerf; his rich Christmases with Mr. and Mrs. Jimmy Stewart (Jimmy watches It's a Wonderful Life every Christmas, along with millions of other Americans). Highlights among nothing but highlights, include exciting evening flights with Sinatra to Buffalo or somewhere for a one-night stand and getting back to Manhattan for a midnight Italian feast; and a heartbreaking fight with Bogart that ends with Bogie dying while Deutsch cries in Romanoff's men's room. A great get-well giftto yourself or anyone who needs a dreamlift.
Pub Date: May 9, 1991
ISBN: 0-399-13595-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
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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