Leisurely and ramblingly informative rather than gripping, then: a grand, funny tinsel-town cornucopia bursting with...
Father was optimistic B. P. Schulberg—philanderer, compulsive gambler, publicist (he dubbed Pickford "America's Sweetheart"), scenarist, lieutenant to "Uncle Adolph" Zukor, founder of Preferred Pictures, manager of Paramount, discoverer of Clara Bow, archenemy of L. B. Mayer. Mother was suspicious, pessimistic Ada, devotee of self-improvement, Jewish-intellectual style (later Hollywood's proto-typical woman-agent). And so little Buddy—born 1914—was indeed a Hollywood prince, with the Studio as "composite father." He and chum Maurice Rapf (son of a rival studio chief) played on the Ben Hur set; they cut up by flinging rotten figs at Norma Shearer et al. Buddy was fawned over by the stars, especially B.P.'s doxy Clara Bow—poor "Crisis-a-Day Clara," Brooklyn-accented and desperately seductive, even with a ten-year-old ("Mmmmmm. How wouldja like ta drive up to Arrowhead this weekend, Buddy? Just the two of uz!"). Buddy sat in on story conferences, had a summer job in the publicity department, got an "advanced course" in psychopathology: the miserable kiddie stars, the pathologically insecure biggies, the epic thick-headedness of such endearing egomaniacs as now-forgotten George Bancroft. (Schulberg delights in resurrecting the lesser-knowns.) But: "If I had a silver spoon in my mouth, I was gagging on it." How so? Well, Buddy was a terrible stammerer—unhelped by Ada's Freudian theories or voice coaches; he also, with Maurice, "built fear of the opposite sex into a cult." And while Ada pushed Buddy to achieve, B.P. treated his tries at writing exactly the same as the work of $1000-a-day Ben Hecht ("Lousy!" was the usual one-word critique). But, above all, there was the endless B.P./Ada bickering—peaking when Buddy was 17, when B.P. was carrying on with Sylvia Sidney; Ada screamed ("She's nothing but a little hoot. Cheap little kike!"); Oedipally feverish Buddy, sent east to prep school, dreamed of assassinating homewrecker Sylvia. . . and even made one melodramatic appearance at the Sidney place. A great story of domestic nightmare and adolescent fury? Yes indeed. But Schulberg has chosen not to shape or dwell on it, Haywire-fashion. Instead, drawing on B.P.'s unpublished memoirs as well as his own memories, he cheerfully surrounds the personal drama here with a broad range of Hollywood history and anecdotes.
Leisurely and ramblingly informative rather than gripping, then: a grand, funny tinsel-town cornucopia bursting with first-hand, second-hand, and third-hand tales.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1981
ISBN: 9781566635264
Page Count: 548
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2013
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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