Goldman, author of acclaimed biographies of Fanny Brice (1992) and Al Jolson (1988), continues his excavation of the Jewish stars of the 1920s and '30s. The saucer-eyed Eddie Cantor (18921964) is all but forgotten today except to historians of the musical stage and film, yet he was a master of every medium he attempted, from vaudeville to television, and his variegated career represents a microcosm of 20th-century American show business. Indeed, as Goldman argues, Cantor's success on radio was unprecedented and pivotal in the rise of that medium. Yet his origins were humble indeed. Born on the Manhattan's Lower East Side as Israel Iskowitz, the boy was quickly orphaned and raised by his doting grandma Esther in Dickensian poverty. The boy learned that he had a natural gift for making people laugh, and that this gift could win him approval (and deflect potential beatings in the tough streets of turn-of-the-century Jewish New York). He dropped out of school at 13 but didn't truly enter show business until he was 16, when he worked as a waiter and singer at a saloon, teamed with an equally young Jimmy Durante. Gradually, he drifted into a career in the entertainment business, slowly climbing the ladder of vaudeville success until he was starring in the Ziegfeld Follies. From there his stardom grew steadily, predicated on his boundless energy, boisterous comedy, and way with a song. At the same time, he remained committed to the people he had left behind, a tireless worker for good causes (including the March of Dimes, which he founded), and a powerful advocate for the burgeoning unions in the entertainment industry. But Goldman tells Cantor's story in overly elaborate detail. At times it seems as if he has listed every public appearance the star ever made. This volume is thus unlikely to resurrect Cantor's memory, although it captures some of his appeal. Interesting reading, but ultimately a book for the already committed fan.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-19-507402-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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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