As literate and witty as a Comden-and-Green lyric, the noted Broadway and Hollywood wordsmith's memoir concentrates on her non- working life, with a few nods to famous friends thrown in as a bonus. Comden's evocative account of growing up in Brooklyn during the 1920s captures a world in transition: A hallway light fixture has an electric bulb on the bottom and a gas fixture (``cheaper to run'') on top; her well-to-do grandfather still has nightmares about hiding from the Cossacks back in Russia; her relatives shake their head when Uncle David marries a 19-year-old flapper who smokes, wears red nail polish, and (worst of all) is Rumanian. As the lively anecdotes accumulate, we become acquainted with Comden's dignified, ladylike mother; her warm, nurturing father; and the author herself—smart, not so pretty, fascinated with words even as a child. The chapter on her late husband, Steve Kyle, is less compelling, though obviously heartfelt, and the obligatory sketches of buddies like Leonard Bernstein, Lauren Bacall, and James Jones seem rather perfunctory, though there is a marvelous, faintly malicious tale of Charlie Chaplin giving an impromptu performance with Comden at a party and feeling obliged to upstage her even in that casual setting. The author dulls the impact of genuinely funny lines like ``I got my decorator through my therapist. Doesn't everyone?'' by descending on occasion into archness; the fact that she discovered a largely French-speaking congregation at an Upper East Side synagogue hardly justifies the crack `` `Vous ne pouvez jamais revenir chez vous,' as Tomas Loup (Thomas Wolfe) once wrote.'' Her painful, honest depiction of son Alan's descent into drug addiction and eventual death from AIDS in 1990 is more representative of the book's better moments, as is her brisk chronicle, both amused and outraged, of the indignities her aging body has visited on her. Despite some glib patches, surprisingly sincere and moving. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-70579-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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