Possessing a certain charm, but missing a lot of pieces. (Photos throughout)
Curious and evocative fragments of autobiography by boulevardier and screenwriter Moffat, gathered and embellished by Lambert (Natalie Wood, 2004, etc.).
Curious because Moffat struck no great sparks in a life devoted mainly to serial infidelities. In an extended introductory biography, Lambert paints a fast portrait. His parents left young Ivan in the aristocratic care of his grandmother, Lady Tree (which means he was raised by nannies), and boarding school offered the classic immersion in English bestiality. But during his WWII stint in the film corps, he met George Stevens and ignited his career as a screenwriter and script doctor. Moffat worked on Giant, Shane, A Place in the Sun, They Came to Cordura, and other film and TV productions—though his time in Hollywood was short. His later years were mostly given over to luxury (as much of it as he could afford or take advantage of) and romance. The glancing text is evocative because the catalogue of Moffat’s girlfriends, wives, and swell gatherings conjures up a world in which someone whose family was heavy on bloodlines though short on cash got to spend a good amount of time in the great houses and castles of Europe. The autobiographical component here, which Moffat wrote in fits and starts over the years, relates his days visiting with the vanishing aristocracy and the High Bohemia of the Gargoyle Club. Lambert includes letters and interviews, but they have a tendency to be superficial, such as an anecdote about how Stevens didn’t like Citizen Kane at first, then “reconsidered all that, and thought how serious and marvelous it was, one of the best films he’d ever seen.” There are a few good tidbits, however, as when Dylan Thomas advised Charlie Chaplin, who was having trouble with the press, to “tell them to go fuck their bloody eyelids.”
Possessing a certain charm, but missing a lot of pieces. (Photos throughout)Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42247-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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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