Selective but not sketchy, with vivid, valuable recollections of Broadway during its golden age.
Warm, ingratiating memoir of an acting career spanning 60 years.
Born in 1915 in Brooklyn, Wallach resisted his family’s insistence that he become a teacher. When he failed a qualifying exam (deliberately?), the classroom’s loss became theater and film’s great gain. In the early ’40s, he auditioned for the Neighborhood Playhouse’s feared guru, Sanford Meisner, who told Wallach it would take 20 years for him to learn how to act. After Army service interrupted his assault on Broadway, Wallach returned to Times Square, making the rounds with such fellow hopefuls as Tony Randall, Marlon Brando and a feisty, attractive redhead who later became his wife and frequent acting partner, Anne Jackson. A genial raconteur, Wallach comes up with a good story for every play or film he recalls. One night after making his entrance in The Rose Tattoo, he caught costar Maureen Stapleton turning upstage to yawn. About to begin a performance of The Teahouse of the August Moon, he got a thumbs up from a stagehand who raised the curtain, then fell over dead. The show went on. Film offers came Wallach’s way in the mid-’50s, bringing hard-to-resist opportunities to travel and make good money. His portrait of John Huston directing The Misfits is far less negative than other accounts of that production, and the actor’s vivid sketch of Sergio Leone also bolsters a directorial reputation. Whatever demons may have haunted Wallach’s life are mostly kept offstage. Onstage fights with Jackson in plays like The Madwoman of Chaillot, he writes, became pressure valves that have kept their marriage going for 56 years.
Selective but not sketchy, with vivid, valuable recollections of Broadway during its golden age.Pub Date: May 9, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-101189-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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