A book-length Special Achievement Oscar acceptance speech.
Onetime special assistant to LBJ and head of the Motion Picture Association of America pens his memoirs, definitely rated G.
It should come as no surprise that when somebody like Valenti (Protect and Defend, 1992, etc.) finally gets around to writing the story of his life, he not only dishes no dirt, but eliminates every hint of grime. As he tells it in a narrative that hops willy-nilly through time, life is peachy, filled well-nigh to bursting with wonderful opportunities, lucky coincidences, helpful friends and memorable dinner parties. Things started out peachy growing up among Greek and Italian immigrants on an unpaved street in Houston and just kept getting better, almost without fail. Sure, serving as a B-25 pilot during WWII had its tough moments, but the GI Bill got him into Harvard Business School, which eventually helped him set up an ad agency back in Houston, so that worked out OK. It was a bummer for this well-connected Lone Star Democrat to have helped arrange JFK’s Texas visit in November 1963, but hours after the assassination he was on Air Force One as a special assistant to the new president, so there’s a silver lining there too. Valenti accords readers a fascinating and rightfully adoring glimpse of volcanic, passionate LBJ, but his time at the White House ended in 1966, when he was wooed by Hollywood to head up the MPAA. (He finally stepped down in 2004.) It would be nasty to conclude that Valenti comes off here as nothing more than a company man with a toothy Cheshire grin, but it’s hard to find anything much more positive to say about a memoir more intent on name-dropping and ticking off plaudits to buddies and bosses than in giving a reckoning of Valenti the man.
A book-length Special Achievement Oscar acceptance speech.Pub Date: June 12, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-34664-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
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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