Warts and all, but noted with love.
Martin recalls her father—“the King of Cool,” as hew was designated by Elvis Presley—with clear-eyed affection and understanding.
Martin, who could have been embittered by her sometimes rocky relations with her father, instead displays remarkable understanding of his complex temperament. An unemotional man, Dean disliked small talk and enjoyed golf because it was a game he could play without too much social interaction. He was disciplined and actually drank very little, though he gained a reputation as a drunk because he sometimes acted that way. Despite his success and wealth, Martin observes, he was “sometimes happiest when left alone.” She first describes Dean’s early career as a touring band singer, his marriage to her mother Betty, his association with Jerry Lewis, and his move to Hollywood. In 1949, when Martin was only a few months old, Dean left Betty for Jeanne, who became his second wife. For nine years, Martin and her three older siblings saw very little of their father. Life with their mother, at first a round of glamorous parties, grew grim as Betty’s drinking increased and the money evaporated; they moved into increasingly smaller homes, and elder sister Gina handled the childcare and housekeeping. In 1957, realizing that Betty could no longer care for her children, their Aunt Anne took them to Dean’s house. He got custody, and they would see very little of Betty in the years to come. Grateful for the stability and the opportunities stepmother Jeanne provided for them, Martin recalls the high points of those years: parties attended by Marilyn Monroe, meetings with Elvis and the Beatles, movie premieres. She deftly describes Dean’s Las Vegas acts, his hit songs (“Volare,” “That’s Amore,” etc.), and films like Ocean’s Eleven, a testament to his membership in the Rat Pack, and his close friendship with Frank Sinatra.
Warts and all, but noted with love.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-5043-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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