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
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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