High-life memoir that smokes like a heat-seeking missile. Many readers won't get past the opening chapters of Lee's story (told in the first-person present), which propel the reader on greased skids and create a queasy momentum that allows little time for sympathy for Lee to grow. Those who stay the distance, though, will undoubtedly give Lee a big word-of-mouth boost. This book is unbelievable and its title adjective ``tarnished'' a total understatement. Lee's affairs with famed Don Juans are legion, her drugs top-grade and never-ending (despite a passing shot at A.A.), her crises the stuff of Krantz or Steel. Lee falls victim to her abused mother, a madwoman; steals her sister's lover at 16 to lose her virginity; takes the fast elevator up in Manhattan's glitterworld to bed with Warren Beatty and Roman Polanski; flies to London with Adnan Kashoggi (who is married to Saroya, with whom Beatty and Lee have threesomes, a form of triangular romping that Polanski is apparently addicted to as well); or wails with Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, or Jimmy Connors—just for starters. Many of these are long-term lovers (who can afford jet-set apartments), but along the way Lee collects countless unfamed lovers, candy bars for a casual energy lift. At times she earns money as a fashion model or from bit parts in movies. Her Waterloo is a major liaison with Richard Pryor, who time and again beats her mercilessly, then marries her, only to ask for a divorce. (Lee describes his celebrated burning as a matter of Pryor dousing himself with 150- proof rum, then lighting a match to immolate himself.) She returns to him again and again, though, just this past summer leaving him bedridden with drugs. A struggling frankness amid a bonfire of dirty linen.
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1991
ISBN: 1-56025-025-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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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