This is the first book by Winecoff, a graduate of the film program at UCLA, who ``grew up around the corner'' from his subject, Psycho star Anthony Perkins. Unfortunately for his career and his emotional balance, Perkins was quickly condemned to be thought of as just that, the star of Alfred Hitchcock's epochal 1960 film. Although he had a not undistinguished career on stage and actually made few horror films until relatively late in his career, Perkins would be forever identified with the knife-wielding Norman Bates. However, as Winecoff's book amply documents, that was one of his lesser problems. Perkins was the son of the famous stage actor Osgood Perkins, who died when the boy was only five. Perkins's mother, Jane, was a cold and dominating woman. The boy was sent to boarding schools, where he was generally miserable. His life was made all the more difficult by his realization that he was gay. Winecoff assiduously traces Perkins's career path—from summer stock to a premature Hollywood debut in Cukor's The Actress, to Broadway success in Look Homeward, Angel, then back to Hollywood for Friendly Persuasion and stardom. Perkins had a somewhat ambiguous marriage to Berry Berenson, which produced two children, whom he doted on. His life and work after Psycho seem to constitute a nearly unbroken downward spiral, including an escalating drug problem and culminating with his death in 1992 from AIDS. The book is the product of a tremendous amount of homework; Winecoff seems to have interviewed everyone living who ever worked with Perkins. Unfortunately, the prose is gratingly melodramatic and filled with mixed metaphors and solecisms (a play ``had flopped without a trace''). Winecoff shows little affection for most of Perkins's work, which leads the reader to wonder why why he has produced this long and tedious book. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club and Quality Paperback Book Club selections)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-525-94064-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
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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