Feisty memoirs of a blazing youth in the theater and a slow evolution into an outstanding character actor. At age 24 Meredith (b. 1909) was hailed as the greatest young actor in the American theater for his performance in Maxwell Anderson's poetic drama Winterset (Anderson later wrote High Tor and The Star Wagon for him). But he has been around so long—more recent roles include the Penguin in the Batman TV series and Sylvester Stallone's aged trainer in the Rocky movies—that few readers or moviegoers under 40 have any idea that he was once the brightest light on Broadway, notorious for his inspired nuttiness. Meredith prefers to pass lightly over his awful childhood with an alcoholic father, but he still relishes the memory of his triumphant opening night in Winterset—as well as his equally overwhelming reception that night by Tallulah Bankhead, who met him stark naked at the door of her apartment in the Gotham Hotel, fed him cocaine, took him to bed, and at the critical moment pushed him aside. Meredith peaked early as Prince Hal in Orson Welles's Shakespearean history marathon Five Kings, though he stayed on top as a leading actor with the parts of George in Of Mice and Men and Ernie Pyle in The Story of G.I. Joe. He served in the Army Air Corps during WW II, was blacklisted in the '50s, and directed Zero Mostel in Ulysses in Nighttown during the '60s. Many of his tales involve his flirtatious wife, Paulette Goddard, as well as Charles Laughton, John Huston, Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Jimmy Stewart, and his decades-long friendship with John Steinbeck. Charm by the buckets, with a bright eye and wicked brilliance.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-56717-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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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