As cluttered as the contents of a traveling player’s trunk, but every bit as revealing and charming.
A veteran actor of stage and screen rehearses his long personal and professional life, often with humor, rarely with rancor.
Plummer, who will turn 80 next year, moves swiftly through his privileged Canadian boyhood, pausing to recount some anecdotes with whimsy before arriving at the genesis of his long affection for the stage, especially the classical theater. (He performed most recently at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in the summer of 2008). Sprinkling his text sometimes too liberally with quotations from favorite scripts and writers (often Kipling, a lifelong love), Plummer pulls few punches. He admits, perhaps too gleefully, that his early-career tomcatting and carousing resulted in two divorces—oddly, he chides his second wife for her drinking—but speaks with pride about his third marriage, which has lasted four decades. He has hard words for very few in his profession—generally directors who didn’t get it—and sings the praises of numerous colleagues, including Jason Robards, James Mason, William Hurt, Boris Karloff, Raymond Massey and, more recently, Russell Crowe and Diane Lane, with whom he did Must Love Dogs (Plummer does, by the way). Readers may have some trouble figuring out when exactly he met these folks, as pages go by without any hint of a date. Although he admits to having accepted some unfortunate movie and TV roles merely for the money, Plummer also recounts instances when he turned down film offers to do classical theater. He played all the great Shakespearean roles—in Canada, on Broadway, in England—and writes most excitedly about his success with Cyrano (1973). The insouciant raconteur virtually ignored his daughter, actress Amanda Plummer (product of his brief marriage to Tammy Grimes), until she was an adult, but says they’re now close. He also claims to have lived in an actual haunted house.
As cluttered as the contents of a traveling player’s trunk, but every bit as revealing and charming.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-679-42162-7
Page Count: 660
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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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