A prolific biographer of Hollywood's famous and forgotten, Parish (Liza! The Liza Minnelli Story, not reviewed, etc.) pieces together the usual celebrity rehash, together with some original interviews with some of the peripheral people in Rosie's life. Parish has combed the Net, the Reader's Guide, and a fair amount of videotape to present the chronological events of the life of TV's new talk-show queen, accompanied by lots of psychological conjecture and analysis, including a chapter that discusses whether or not Rosie is a lesbian. O'Donnell was born in Commack, Long Island, one of five children born to an Irishman who designed cameras for spy satellites. Her mother died of cancer when Rosie was 10, in what she has described as the defining event of her life. Her father dealt with his grief by withdrawing from his family, and Rosie took on many of her mother's responsibilities at an early age, including the care of a diabetic grandmother. Her father has remained distant and emotionally unavailable; they have not repaired their relationship. As a child, Rosie buried herself in television, made heroines of her favorite stars, Barbra Streisand and Better Midler, and dedicated herself to making it in the biz. Parish traces Rosie's career from Long Island comedy clubs, where she began at 16, success as a stand-up comic, to movies (A League of Their Own and Sleepless in Seattle), and finally on to her highly successful TV talk show. There is a little about the famous friendship between Rosie and Madonna, who met while making League; and a wrap-up with Rosie's single-parent adoption of her son, Parker Jaren. A few steps up from supermarket tabloid, but with no juicy gossip; and for those following Rosie coverage in the media or at her Web sites, there's not much news here.
Pub Date: April 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-7867-0410-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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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