Entertaining, informative, and shrewdly perceptive.
Breezy, upbeat memoir from the impresario who produced Broadway musicals like Guys and Dolls and Can-Can, as well as the film version of Cabaret.
Born in 1911 to immigrant parents in Brooklyn, Feuer became a trumpet player with the encouragement of his mother. Actually, this enthusiastic Boy Scout wanted to play the bugle, but Mom thought the trumpet would be a more practical instrument. And she was right, because after the death of his father (manager of a Yiddish theater on Second Avenue), the family needed money, and Feuer quit school to play with various pick-up bands that provided music for political campaigns. Next he was accepted at Juilliard and soon began making big money playing with club bands. And on to California, where he arranged music for the movies, as well as making lots of good and useful friends like Frank Loesser, Jule Styne, and Susan Hayward. The pay was good and the life easy—he learned to play polo and tennis—but Feuer could never entirely forget that Hollywood was the land of painted sunsets and rocks you could move. Once his service making WWII training films was over, he was ready for more satisfying work than the studios provided. He moved back to New York and with business partner Ernie Martin produced musicals that were not (just) vehicles for star performers but had real content and logical storylines. Feuer vividly recalls shows like Where’s Charley?, Guys and Dolls, and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, while giving a crash course in the often frustrating business of entertainment. He tells readers how to improve a production in out-of-town tryouts and what it was like to work with Ray Bolger, Liza Minnelli, George Kaufman, Cole Porter, Bob Fosse, and a host of others. He also wryly recalls such flops as the movie version of A Chorus Line.
Entertaining, informative, and shrewdly perceptive.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-3611-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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