Brutal honesty from a Hollywood insider. Now, that’s something to celebrate. Brillstein’s memoir, an exercise in narcissism, is filled with clichés, abounds in shameless name-dropping, and dishes dirt sanctimoniously—but it is nonetheless delightful. The longtime movie-star manager, whose clients over the years included Jim Henson, Jim Belushi, and most of the comics associated with the heyday of Saturday Night Live, writes this tell-all from the perspective of retirement. Interspersed with his history are wonderfully quirky asides from today—moody ruminations on being too old and unhip to compete in the present market. Brillstein’s company is currently run by his protégé, Brad Grey, and it handles most of the top comic talent in the country. Brillstein’s account of how he got to that zenith is a haphazard tale that is often hilarious. He was a fat kid from a crazy New York Jewish family connected to the vaudeville world. He started in the mail room at the William Morris agency and worked his way up, ever so slowly, until he hit the big time in the 1970s. As much as he is overblown about his own talents as a go-getter, he is self-deprecating about his social skills and weakness for women and gambling. The tone is colloquial, rife with curse words, and often prone to rants about those who Brillstein thinks have wronged him, such as agent Mike Ovitz. Brillstein’s narrative is at its most ineffective when he tries to rationalize how he handled Belushi’s drug problem. It takes a lot of hemming and hawing to come to the conclusion that he probably couldn’t have done anything to prevent the man’s death. The author is at his best when describing the loving and supportive relationship he had with Henson. Brillstein rightly stops short of taking credit for anything his clients did while under his protection, but any man who made it possible for Kermit to come to life has got to be worth some attention. (16 pages photos)
Pub Date: Nov. 3, 1999
ISBN: 0-316-11885-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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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