A third-rate biography of a second-rate talent. Even a fading camp icon like Midler deserves better than Mair's (Oprah Winfrey, 1994, not reviewed, etc.) breathless yet strangely feeble account. Despite its subtitle, this book, which has all the intimacy of a handshake, seems more of a testament to the NEXIS database than anything approaching original authorial research. Mair manages the remarkable feat of simultaneously telling us both more and less than we ever wanted to know as he traces Midler's rise from a lonely Jewish girl growing up in Hawaii to her mild accomplishments as chanteuse, actress, and occasional author. Every wonderful and fabulous and sensational twitch of an achievement by Midler is catalogued, with just a grudging iota of elbow room set aside for her less than wonderful, fabulous, and sensational moments. So she has a reputation for being incredibly difficult to work with? Tra-la-la. So she fired her entire musical troupe after a concert tour? Tiddley pom. Mair makes few attempts to understand Midler, to subject her and her talents to the kind of considered critical or psychological analysis usually found in biographies. In fact, Mair seems perfectly content to luxuriate in the reflected glow of his subject's general stupendousness. As he writes, ``We love her because she is us and we are her.'' Almost in spite of himself, Mair occasionally stumbles across something interesting. His brief analysis of the difficulties older actresses have finding roles (women over 40 get only 9 percent of all roles) borders on the trenchant. He also manages a reasonable understanding of Midler's resonant appeal to gay audiences. Not so much a tell-all biography as a fawning and amateurish show-and-tell. (24 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55972-272-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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
PERSPECTIVES
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