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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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