Uneven but breezy, incisive and amusing—nice to have you back, Dick.
Veteran talk-show titan turns comic columnist.
Cavett (co-author: Eye on Cavett, 1983, etc.) began an online column for the New York Times in 2007, musing on current events and reminiscing about his many celebrity encounters. This slim volume collects a number of these pieces for a diverting, if slight, reading experience. All of the familiar Cavett tics are in evidence: idyllic recollections of his Nebraska boyhood, accounts of his adventures at Yale, cavils against poor grammar and the coarsening of popular culture and endless anecdotes celebrating the wit and wisdom of show-business luminaries like Richard Burton, John Wayne, William F. Buckley and, inevitably, Groucho Marx—though the reader can’t escape the impression that it is Cavett’s own way with a one-liner that is nearest to the author’s heart. This general air of self-regard is a familiar complaint about Cavett, and not unearned, but fans will find it consistent with his low-key, cozy charm. It is impossible to read his first-person prose without hearing that distinctive, sonorously buzzing voice—and, at this point in his long career, the name-dropping and “ain’t I clever” mien are part and parcel of the author’s appeal. The quality of the pieces is hit-or-miss, a perhaps unavoidable result of the column-a-week grind. The Andy Rooney–esque grouchiness over commonly mispronounced words and reflexive jabs at George W. Bush are tired tropes, but his remarkable memory abounds with surprising and touching insights into such icons as Katherine Hepburn and Richard Nixon. The highlight of the book is Cavett’s copious reconstruction of the famous installment of his late-night program in which he presided over, and became involved in, a surreally escalating contretemps between authors Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, which occasioned one of the funniest ad-libs in the author’s career, and, indeed, in the history of television itself. No wonder he likes to tell it.
Uneven but breezy, incisive and amusing—nice to have you back, Dick.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9195-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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