Two thumbs up for this engrossing, sometimes shocking, memoir of life as a child actor during the silent-movie era. The real-life tale of Baby Peggy makes the fictional Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? seem tame in comparison. Discovered in 1921 at the ripe old age of 19 months, Cary (Hollywood Children, 1978, etc.)—then known as Baby Peggy—quickly became one of Hollywood's most popular stars. By the age of five, she'd made 150 comedy two- reelers and a handful of features, earning hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. By the time she was six, her fame had peaked, and a reasonably successful vaudeville tour and several adolescent comeback attempts did little to stop her slide into penurious anonymity. As former child actor Paul Peterson once observed, ``Fame is a dangerous drug and should be kept out of the reach of children.'' In Baby Peggy's case, fame should also have been kept away from her parents. Backstage parents from hell, they insisted on closely controlling every aspect of her life (her father, a cowboy, believed in raising children the way you would break a horse). But their own lives soon spiraled into chaotic excess as they freely spent her substantial wealth on themselves. What money remained was stolen by an unsavory assortment of relatives and managers. Soon, in the depths of the Depression, there literally was nothing left, and the family was forced to rely on charity. It was only the independence of adulthood that gave Cary the ability to finally break free from her parents and her old identity and go on to put together a reasonably normal life as a bookseller and writer. Her story drags a little here, but considering the suicides, serial marriages, and disastrous addictions that have afflicted so many former child stars, normalcy in itself is a remarkable achievement. Hollywood memoirs just don't get any better than this. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14760-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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