Granger, who knows the dramatic when he sees it, fills his story with vivid moments from his career.
Actor Granger recalls life onstage and in film in an engaging, colorful memoir.
Granger had good looks, good luck and good timing, ending up center stage for the golden ages of film, Broadway and live TV. To get into films, he struggled naught. A casting director for Samuel Goldwyn spotted Granger at 18 acting in a play in Los Angeles. Goldwyn signed Granger to a long-term contract in 1943. A series of leading roles followed in mostly second-rate films. Granger fared better on loan-outs to other studios, especially to Warner Bros., where Hitchcock directed him in the classic suspenser Strangers on a Train. The catch was that Goldwyn added loan-out time to other Draconian contract terms. Reaching into Goldwyn’s grab-bag of hilarious malapropisms, Granger begged the producer to “Include me out.” Granger wanted to act and study acting in New York. Only after a costly settlement with Goldwyn was Granger freed. He then studied with Sandy Meisner, honed his craft in stock and TV and hit Broadway, at last, in the musical First Impressions, a flop. Continuing to work in film, he made Senso in Italy with Luchino Visconti. Granger’s extended production log for this film highlights the book. The actor offers less detail about the person, seldom providing glimpses of what he’s like between takes. He does recall affairs with women (Shelley Winters, Ava Gardner) and men (playwright Arthur Laurents) and writes of his bisexuality with equanimity: “I have loved men. I have loved women. I will talk with affection and without guilt or remorse about both in this book.”
Granger, who knows the dramatic when he sees it, fills his story with vivid moments from his career.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-35773-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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