Do we really need yet another James Dean biography? Spoto (Decline and Fall of the House of Windsor, 1995) thinks so. James Dean had starring roles in only three motion pictures, East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant, but he has been the subject of more full-length biographies than the directors of those films—Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, and George Stevens—combined. This latest addition to the Dean canon comes from a biographer known best for airing the dirty laundry of such artists as Alfred Hitchcock, Lotte Lenya, and Laurence Olivier. Ironically, the basic thrust of Rebel is to denounce Spoto's predecessors for vastly inflating the alleged sexual escapades of his protagonist. Quite rightly, too. As Spoto points out, there is virtually no convincing evidence for the portrait of Dean as gay hustler or sadomasochist that has been painted in previous books. The basic trajectory of his life is familiar: Dean's trauma over the death of his doting mother when he was nine, his lifelong search for a replacement for the love thus lost, his meteoric rise as an actor and his sudden death. Anything but a Dean-worshipper, Spoto brings a different spin to this material; his Dean is a terribly immature and selfish young man, alternately arrogant and shy, ill-mannered and sweet. Spoto has spoken to several Dean acquaintances (most of whom had not been interviewed much before) and draws heavily on newspaper and magazine accounts from the period, as well as on the memoirs of other actors and directors. The result is perhaps the most detailed biography of Dean to date but, at 400 pages, a bit of a bore for all but the most hardcore fans. Spoto's analysis of Deanolatry in his opening and closing chapters is simultaneously on-the-money and rather cruel, as is his portrait of the troubled, talented, but callow young man on whom that worship has been posthumously lavished. ($125,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017656-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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