Forty-plus dramatic years in the footlights, related in a numbing monotone.
A bland memoir from the hugely talented Broadway performer.
Born in Detroit in 1942 to a depressive war bride and a joyless Army veteran, McKechnie recognized early on in herself an all-encompassing love for theater. She was cast, at age eight, in a local production of Our Town. As a teenager, she had several productions under her belt and was teaching ballet. After running away (twice) to New York, McKechnie’s star rose as she toured the country with productions such as West Side Story. Television commercials followed in the mid-’60s and a two-year stint in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, dancing under the direction of Bob Fosse. While working on the TV variety show Hullabaloo, and then on Dark Shadows, young McKechnie enjoyed a short-lived marriage to promoter Al Schwartz. While life in L.A. depressed her, work on A Chorus Line elated her. In the spring of 1976, McKechnie’s Tony for her performance in that show was just one of nine the production received. Her second marriage, to choreographer Michael Bennett, was not only fleeting but ended badly, leaving the actress blacklisted, without so much as an audition on her schedule. A debilitating bout of rheumatoid arthritis threatened to take away her livelihood altogether, but a cleansing, holistic intervention slowly brought her back, just in time to perform in A Chorus Line in Tokyo and Paris, in the summer of 1985. Positive reviews revitalized McKechnie’s career, though clouds brought about by her mother’s death from lung cancer and Bennett’s sudden demise from AIDS hovered darkly. McKechnie too often renders her long career on stage with stale, pedestrian prose (countless sentences begin “I remember”), though she does offer charming anecdotes about legendary personalities: the classy professionalism of Aaron Spelling; the angry animosity of Ethel Merman; the hilarity of Elaine Stritch.
Forty-plus dramatic years in the footlights, related in a numbing monotone.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-5520-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
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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