One can’t help but wonder whether a night of drinking with the author might be more fun than reading this exhaustive...
One of Hollywood’s most successful and influential stuntmen recounts a life filled with fast living, hard partying and dozens of broken bones.
In most on-screen situations, stuntmen are seen and not heard. Needham, a true innovator of his craft who’s not shy about touting his accomplishments, is a colorful exception. Growing up as a poor sharecropper’s son in Arkansas, the undereducated author parlayed stints as a tree climber and paratrooper into a career as a stuntman at a time when there was a high demand for men willing to fling themselves from horseback, get blown up and choreograph a bar brawl. His (self-proclaimed) ingenuity, willingness to try anything and work ethic soon led to more work than he could handle. Needham began to train other stuntmen, working his way up to the position of stunt coordinator and second-unit director while still performing death-defying falls, car crashes and jumps alongside of or doubling some of the most famous actors in the business, including John Wayne and Burt Reynolds. His stories are by turns entertaining and gripping, including an account of running in the real cross-country Cannonball race—the inspiration for the comedy classic Cannonball Run, which Needham directed—and a daring escape from Prague amid a movie shoot after an invasion by Russian troops. After a while, though, the author’s self-aggrandizing style, peppered with braggadocio and oozing machismo, becomes monotonous, rendering what could have been an exhilarating and enlightening insider’s guide from a groundbreaking performer into little more than a self-serving memoir that strokes an already well-stroked ego.
One can’t help but wonder whether a night of drinking with the author might be more fun than reading this exhaustive chronicle. A little Hal goes a long way.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-07899-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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