A vast improvement over Robbins's earlier bios of Yul Brynner, James Stewart, and Billy and Ruth Graham, largely because Durante (1893-1980) was such a greathearted, lovable man with his giant schnozzola and his witty ``moiderin'' of the English language. Durante got his nose from his mother, who bore him on a kitchen table in Brooklyn (`` `Holy Smokes!' yells da neighbor lady whose deliverin' me. 'Dis ain't da baby, it's da stork!' ''). He early showed a mastery of the piano (``My father thought I'd become a concert piano player like that Russian guy, Sir Rockinoff'') but was diverted from the classics to playing ragtime and jazz in Coney Island bawdy houses. Soon, Durante married Jeanne Olson, a singer, who guided him into better jobs. His career spanned nightclubs and speak-easies, Broadway, Hollywood, radio, records, and TV, and included two comebacks. His early films are forgettable turkeys, his successes Jumbo and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. In nightclubs Durante began telling more and more jokes to establish that he was the leader of the band, yelling, ``Stop the music!'' and erupting with a comical outburst. But the greater his successes, the more his wife drank, feeling alienated from Durante, who attracted the Broadway greats. After 22 years of marriage, Jeanne died of a heart ailment and alcoholism. Remarrying at age 67, Durante and his second bride, 39, adopted a girl. Later, after a stroke felled the actor, his friends attested that there was something in him that brought out the best in them. Durante died at age 86. Swift but moving, light but not thin. (Photographs.)
Pub Date: Nov. 20, 1991
ISBN: 1-55778-418-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
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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