Biographer and novelist Dewey (Marcello Mastroianni, 1993; Reasonable Doubts, 1991) offers a voluminous, highly intelligent look at one of the richest and most complex of Hollywood star personas, not incidentally, one of the industry's most beloved actors. Intriguingly, as Dewey ably demonstrates, Stewart is one of those actors who—thanks to generations of comedians and impressionists—we think we know cold but whose work is continually surprising. Ironically, Stewart had the kind of upbringing that people identify with his film characters: He was raised in Indiana, Penn., a small town in the middle of the state. His father, Alex, was a dominating personality, owner of a large hardware store, one of the town's most successful businesses. It was Alex who determined that his only son would follow his path to the Mercersburg Academy and Princeton. Alex was less than thrilled when Jimmy developed more of an interest in theater than in his chosen field, architecture, but the father was also shrewd enough to give him his opportunity to fail. Needless to say, he didn't. Stewart's rise was swift, moving like lightning from summer stock to Broadway to Hollywood and stardom. Dewey, as interested in the work as he is in the life, examines each of Stewart's films in considerable detail and with real acumen. Nor does he neglect Stewart's private life; he is utterly frank but never titillating about the actor's affairs with Norma Shearer, Ginger Rogers, Marlene Dietrich, and Olivia De Havilland. Also very astute is the analysis of Stewart's career choices, and the detailed recounting of his distinguished record as a bomber pilot and squad commander during WW II is downright moving. Dewey describes everything with a workmanlike prose that may not sing, but it hums nicely. A model of how to do a serious but entertaining Hollywood biography; Dewey never loses sight of the work, which is what makes Stewart important in the first place. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-57036-227-0
Page Count: 521
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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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