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
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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