An unrevealing, workmanlike biography of Walt Disney’s older brother, Roy, the financial brains behind Disney’s success. With only a high school diploma and a handful of years as a bank teller, Roy Disney helped transform Disney from a storefront operation into one of America’s preeminent corporations. While Walt was the visionary and the driving creative force (he conceived of everything from feature-length animated films to Disneyland), Roy was responsible for finding the money to pay for it all. It was Roy who had to attend to the bottom line that his brother so scorned, who had to negotiate all the complex deals and loans, who had to pursue the legions of copyright violators and manage the far-flung sales force. His genial, plainspoken midwestern demeanor camouflaged a tough, canny deal-maker and a keen mind for detail. It was Roy, for example, who as far back as the 1930s insisted on holding onto television rights. Considering their differing temperaments and responsibilities, it isn—t surprising that the brothers did not always see eye to eye. The studio tended to divide into Walt’s “boys” and Roy’s “boys”; there were periods when the brothers quarreled bitterly and communicated only in memos. But they always patched up their differences, and after Walt’s death, Roy postponed his retirement to fulfill his brother’s vision for CalArts and Walt Disney World. Published by Hyperion, a division of Disney, this authorized account has the (inevitably?) sanitized air of a self-serving corporate history about it. Thomas (Clown Prince of Hollywood, 1990, etc.) never manages to get a real feel for his subject and, perhaps because he wrote a biography of Walt, tends to let him dominate throughout. The story’s moral: Genius is seldom solitary and is usually in need of money. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 15, 1998
ISBN: 0-7868-6200-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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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