Life with Barbra, when she was Barbara, from the former boyfriend who helped set her on the road to fame and fortune. Though Streisand has tended to slight the efforts of those who shaped her early career, she has all but ignored actor and scriptwriter Dennen. However, playing Henry Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle, it was Dennen, apparently, who encouraged her to pursue singing when she was focused exclusively on acting, who pushed her to audition, who urged her to treat songs like compact dramas, who taped and critiqued almost every performance. In short, he did everything except teach her to sing. When they first met, brought together in a forgettable play, Streisand was still in her teens and Dennen not much older. Both of them were desperately, and usually unsuccessfully, pursuing the lights of Broadway. It was one of those meetings that create show-biz history. She brought raw, unburnished talent; he brought an unrivaled knowledge of show tunes and great chanteuses backed by a huge record collection, and he had a high-quality tape recorder. Although Dennen had doubts about his heterosexuality, the two soon became lovers. It lasted a little more than a year, falling apart just as Streisand's career really began to take off. Streisand fans will find much of this story familiar, but they will surely be delighted with the details and insights Dennen provides. He is a graceful writer, though his camp sensibility can border on clichÇ; despite some frank, even harsh appraisals, he sometimes swoons vapidly: ``If you met St. Peter at heaven's gate and he asked you what good you had done . . . I would say, `I helped give the world Barbra Streisand.' '' A full and rare look at Streisand before she disappeared into a fog of myth and publicity. (14 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1997
ISBN: 1-57392-160-2
Page Count: 281
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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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