Fast-talking, name-dropping, and skin-deep posthumous memoirs, from the superagent and Oscar party host. Raised in a Yiddish-speaking household in Brooklyn, pint-size Lazar developed street smarts, fastidious grooming habits, and a voracious urge for success. A Brooklyn Law School classmate offered a way into MCA, the talent agency, and before long Lazar was booking bands into hotels and nightclubs and mastering the guerrilla salesmanship that fueled the business. In 1942 he enlisted and soon was producing a huge-deal Air Force benefit. He introduced himself to Moss Hart in a bar and finagled him into writing and directing Winged Victory, which garnered rave reviews- -and a high profile for Lazar. In 1947 Lazar opened his own Hollywood agency, specializing in playwrights from the Northeast. Describing himself as a ``pushy outsider,'' Lazar badgered his friends for introductions, picked up checks in restaurants, and assiduously buddied up to the talented and famous. His no-holds- barred business tactics included setting unprecedented prices, selling properties that he didn't represent, and unloading plays he deemed marked for failure onto unwitting producers before they opened and flopped. Anecdotes from his social life include accounts of catching his neighbor Frank Sinatra shooting a BB gun at portraits of Ava Gardner, of his role in Lauren Bacall's breakup with Sinatra, and of Humphrey Bogart's alcohol-induced bad behavior. Collaborator Tapert's clear-eyed epilogue stands in pronounced counterpoint to Lazar's breathless litany of aspiration and achievement: She recounts his emotional breakdown after the death of his wife and the isolation of his final year. Gossip and blow-by-blows of negotiating bouts offer tasty hors d'oeuvres, but those seeking introspection or insight into the relationship of old Hollywood to new will come away from this showy buffet still hungry. (75 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80418-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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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