At times fascinating, the interviews offer a casual, unguarded look at some of the most high-profile personalities of the...
A career-spanning collection of the writer’s celebrity interviews.
Since 1987, George Wayne, or GW, has picked the brains of pop-culture luminaries for readers of his DIY magazine R.O.M.E., Interview, and Vanity Fair, where his column appeared for 22 years. Collected in this volume for the first time, the interviews offer unique insight into a particular New York social circle populated by the glitterati, fashionistas, celebrities, and other socialites. Having landed in New York in the early 1980s after graduating from the University of Georgia, Wayne immediately immersed himself in downtown clubs, and his predilection for fashion designers and celebrities reflects the exclusivity and stratification of that scene. (References to air-kisses abound.) The “Q&As,” as the author calls them, are conversational and irreverent, and Wayne never shies away from asking controversial, occasionally random questions. He asks Joan Rivers about her fondness for plastic surgery, 90-year-old architect Philip Johnson about Viagra, and on which date David Copperfield first slept with supermodel girlfriend Claudia Schiffer, among other non sequiturs. Updated with contemporary introductions, not all of Wayne’s interviews seem slated for posterity. His fawning adoration of “alpha fox” Ivanka Trump and the assurance that she would “keep POTUS 45 [her father, Donald Trump] grounded and real” is already terribly dated. Other interviewees include model Kate Moss, Donatella Versace, Carrie Fisher, Marc Jacobs, Barry White, Kathleen Turner, Farrah Fawcett, Tony Curtis, Charlton Heston, Martha Stewart, and Russell Simmons. Featuring a foreword by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter (who says Wayne reminds us “that we could all use a bit more mischief in our lives before the age of the individual passes us by for good”), Wayne’s collected interviews are playful snapshots of the rarefied world of celebrity shoulder-rubbing.
At times fascinating, the interviews offer a casual, unguarded look at some of the most high-profile personalities of the past 30 years.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-238007-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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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