by Dick Van Dyke with Todd Gold ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 13, 2015
Those with fond memories of the author’s wholesome movies and TV shows may take pleasure in this dose of good cheer; others...
In this follow-up to his memoir, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business (2011), song-and-dance man Van Dyke relishes his approaching 90th birthday and shares some tips for readers on reaching and enjoying that venerable age.
Best known for Bye Bye Birdie, Mary Poppins, and the Dick Van Dyke Show, the still-energetic actor, aided here by Gold (co-author, with Billy Ray Cyrus: Hillbilly Heart, 2013, etc.), presents not so much a memoir as a collection of sprightly, scattered essays, a few poems, some correspondence with a TV reviewer, one raunchy limerick, and a fair number of platitudinous to-do and not-to-do lists. One chapter, featuring his report card rating of significant events since his birth in 1925, results in some odd juxtapositions: Van Dyke seeing Al Jolson in a “talkie” in 1930 (The Jazz Singer) is followed by the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 (“The country…needed a leader, someone to believe in, and FDR was the man”). Both years receive an A. Van Dyke’s boyhood, marriages, career, bout with alcoholism, health problems: all touched upon but not explored, for this is determinedly upbeat stuff. If the secrets to a long life are good genes and a good attitude, the author appears to have been blessed with both, plus the important factor of good luck. Some celebrity name-dropping is inevitable in a showbiz memoir, but here it is fairly low-key. A late chapter featuring a conversation with longtime friend Carl Reiner would have been a fitting way to wrap up this offering on aging well, but unfortunately, Van Dyke cannot resist concluding this account by tacking on more forgettable platitudes.
Those with fond memories of the author’s wholesome movies and TV shows may take pleasure in this dose of good cheer; others not so much.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60286-296-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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