Breathless prose and many juicy revelations—an absorbing read.
An erstwhile “friendly acquaintance” who fell out with Rumpole of the Bailey’s creator over this biography strips back the man’s jovial veneer to reveal dark and adulterous activities.
Former Sunday Express editor Lord (NIV: The Authorized Biography of David Niven, 2004) delivers a tell-all exposé of the beloved writer and barrister. Indicating early on that Mortimer has a propensity for grossly exaggerating the truth, he briefly dispenses with his formative years and then tries to glean as much information as possible about his eventful life. Mortimer’s marriage to fellow writer Penelope Fletcher is painted with a lurid palette, the nadir of their tortured relationship coming when he impregnated both Fletcher and actress Wendy Craig while also trying to conduct an affair with another thespian, Shirley Anne Field. Such incidents are typical, contends Lord, who catalogues his subject’s various infidelities in great detail and often using words that may bemuse non-U.K. readers (e.g., “he rogered her”). But the author also takes time to document Mortimer’s glittering professional achievements, carefully steering the narrative through his work as a barrister, which saw him successfully fighting against a ban on Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn and supporting ’60s counterculture publication Oz in a slightly less triumphant case. But Mortimer’s wandering eye continued to get the best of him; Lord neatly divides the text among relationship woes, the barrister’s strong socialist leanings and the birth of his children (including the actress Emily Mortimer), before delineating the events that turned an authorized biography into an unauthorized one.
Breathless prose and many juicy revelations—an absorbing read.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-33082-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
