A behind-the-scenes glimpse at parties where the famous mingle with the famous.
A chronicle of a close friendship that might seem unlikely on the surface.
Early on, Simon (Boys in the Trees, 2015) writes that “no one is more interested in famous people than other famous people,” so perhaps the most avid readership for this thin memoir will be famous people who want to read about famous people writing about even more famous people. Simon and Jackie (no last name necessary) would seem to inhabit different circles of fame, but here they seem equally at home in each other’s worlds. The author and her subject were neighbors on Martha’s Vineyard, and they worked together during Jackie’s publishing career on a series of children’s books. Yet what really brought them together was the friendship each had with director Mike Nichols. “Almost every woman I met during the 1980s was besotted with him….I’m not exaggerating when I say that Mike was the preliminary conduit to Jackie’s and my friendship,” writes the author, as she dishes on just how much and how often Nichols would turn the tables and ask her about Jackie. Little wonder, then, that there was a coolness between the woman he married, Diane Sawyer, and the women who thought about marrying him—or settled for something less permanent. Jackie asked Simon to sing at her daughter’s wedding, the two went out to the movies together (they avoided Oliver Stone’s notorious JFK), and Jackie warned Simon about marrying her second husband, who turned out to be gay. The author suggests that some might find the two of them to be an odd couple and that she risks “ridicule or denouncement” in writing such a book. But there’s a full-circle irony in how Jackie had long tried to persuade Simon to write a memoir; now she is the subject of her second.
A behind-the-scenes glimpse at parties where the famous mingle with the famous.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-27772-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
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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