A largely toothless and perfunctory look back at an extraordinary career—it may be cool to not give a damn, but here it...
Jock, joke, movie star, centerfold: the many lives of Burt Reynolds.
Reynolds is a true movie star of the old school, a figure of tremendous charm and charisma. Unfortunately, these qualities do not extend to Reynolds the memoirist, as this desultory account of his life and career fails to evoke the sense of roguish fun so familiar from his many appearances on talk shows over the decades. With the assistance of Winokur (The Big Book of Irony, 2007, etc.), who also co-authored James Garner’s memoir, Reynolds dutifully sketches his early life as if checking items off a list, only perking up when discussing the peccadilloes of his football chums. While this material demonstrates some level of engagement, it’s a bit like suffering through a narcissistic stranger’s tales of schoolyard glory. Reynolds structures the book as a collage, forgoing a strict chronological narrative to offer chapters on specific people and experiences that have most deeply affected his development. The best of these is an extended reminiscence of the filming of Deliverance, a landmark film and his professional breakthrough; the author’s account of the filming is entertaining and insightful. Mostly, though, Reynolds regards his career with a self-deprecating shrug. He declines to dish much dirt, despite his longtime status as tabloid scandal–fodder (ex-wife Loni Anderson comes in for some mild criticism), preferring to extoll the virtues of the likes of Dinah Shore, Jon Voight, Johnny Carson, Bette Davis, and others in the most generically positive terms. Missing are the caustic wit, effortless magnetism, and bracing go-to-hell attitude that made Reynolds such a potent cultural presence in his prime. His remarks about Boogie Nights, the late-career film that revived his reputation and earned him an Oscar nomination, are telling: he didn’t get it and didn’t like it.
A largely toothless and perfunctory look back at an extraordinary career—it may be cool to not give a damn, but here it makes for an uninvolving reading experience.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-17354-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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