Not just Langella’s “famous people I have known,” but a heartfelt love letter to the theater and to the days when stars were...
Stage and screen stalwart Langella recalls his encounters with celebrity, both in and out of the spotlight.
Early on in this engaging memoir, the author notes his difficulty in conveying the “glory” of a chapter’s subject, Noel Coward, to a contemporary audience, “as wit, intelligence, and style have lost ground to stupid, vulgar, and loud.” Curmudgeonly tone aside, Langella’s stories of 65 noteworthy people illustrate his point that the celebrities of today can’t hold a candle to the distant, mysterious, shining lights of yesteryear. The book is organized into a separate chapter for each “dropped name,” in chronological order of their death. Among those appearing, some in brief encounters, others in lifelong relationships, are many of film and theater’s greatest, including Laurence Olivier, Robert Mitchum, Elizabeth Taylor and Rita Hayworth, to name just a few. Freed up, perhaps, to kiss and tell by the death of his subjects, Langella pulls no punches, expressing scorn for talent wasted (Richard Burton) and egotism misplaced (Anthony Quinn, Actors Studio guru Lee Strasberg), and providing scandalous detail on many on-set or backstage dalliances. Some of the stories are humorous, others fascinating, and some—notably the section on Hayworth—heartbreaking. Though often relegated to a supporting role in these stories, Langella’s voice commands the reader’s attention. However, he does not ignore his own flaws, including moments when his arrogance let him down or his ignorance led to humiliation. Through it all, the author’s respect for the craft of acting and those who attempt to practice it at the highest level is evident, and his focus on the importance of real connection between not just actor and audience but between human beings, elevates the book above mere name-dropping.
Not just Langella’s “famous people I have known,” but a heartfelt love letter to the theater and to the days when stars were stars, not merely celebrities.Pub Date: March 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-209447-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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