A breezy memoir of 45 years in television by a lady who's seen it all and is still in there pitching. For many years of her career, Betty White appeared to be one of those uniquely television-made stars: someone who was famous purely for being famous. It wasn't until she created the unforgettable role of Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show that the world saw the remarkable comic actress who was lurking behind the perennial game show contestant. White has a great idea for this autobiography: She tells her life story as reflected in the history of television, a medium she was a part of from its very earliest days. Her first major break, in 1949, was a daytime local Los Angeles show, Hollywood on Television, on which she was required to ad-lib for a staggering five and a half hours a day, six days a week. And yet she found the experience a complete pleasure and moved easily onward to sit-coms, game shows (she eventually became the first female host), variety shows, and more. Throughout, she frequently comments on how what she did would be done in TV today, and envisions the future of the medium. Her private life takes a secondary role here, although her love for husband Allen Ludden is sweetly displayed. Unfortunately for this surprisingly lengthy book, not every anecdote is as engrossing as White seems to think; she gives equal weight to her parade-hosting appearances and her Emmy-winning performances. Still, the actress comes across as good company: a gracious woman with an unkind word for no one. A likable if long-winded autobiography from a justifiably well-loved personality. (b&w photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80042-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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