A fistful of goo.
A biography of actor-director Eastwood that’s tantamount to a puffed-up press release.
Even the most ardent Eastwood fan will sense that journalist Thompson spins every detail of Eastwood’s life and work into cotton candy. Whatever befalls the actor—a divorce, a bad review, a lawsuit—Thompson turns to Eastwood’s advantage. To critics who find Eastwood’s films too violent, for example, Thompson offers Eastwood’s reply: “I tell them to fuck off.” Thompson follows two tracks. One rehashes Eastwood’s now-familiar career: bit parts in potboiler films; TV stardom, on Rawhide; films in Italy; films in Hollywood; the forming of his own production company; his ascendancy as a major American film actor and director; two marriages, many affairs and many children. Interrupting what would charitably be described as the book’s focus and pace are long, tepid interviews with Eastwood and with longtime companion Sondra Locke, who were not quite, as Thompson suggests, the Tracy and Hepburn of their time. Throughout, Thompson’s sourcing is vague and he provides no citations. No matter, since virtually everyone quoted just loves Clint—well, maybe not Locke. The blondes that Eastwood refers to as “squirts,” “shrimps” and “spinners” love Clint when they meet him at his Hog’s Breath Inn in Carmel. Donna Mills loves Clint. Bernadette Peters loves Clint. Meryl Streep loves Clint. Everyone who ever worked on one of his pictures loves Clint (perhaps they read Patrick McGilligan’s 2002 biography of Eastwood, in which the author claims Eastwood fires anyone who criticizes him). Clint’s second wife loves Clint—she gathers for parties the seven children he’s sired by five women. Do the kids enter to “The March of the Siamese Children”? Perhaps Eastwood will star in a remake of The King and I.
A fistful of goo.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-85782-572-1
Page Count: 289
Publisher: John Blake/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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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