Deep salad of diary clippings, jottings, and letters—all bearing on directing plays, films, and operas—from the collected unpublished writings of the Tony-winning director of Equus and M. Butterfly, who died in 1990 following seven years of directing operas at the Met. Never in great health and disabled by polio as a soldier, Dexter touches on autobiography here only when it ties into a production. When he died, he was assembling a journal of sorts from his diaries and director's notes, as well as from letters to and from actors and playwrights, singers, set designers, and other theatrical folk he'd worked with during his 40 years in the theater: Here, his labors were taken over by longtime friend Riggs O'Hara, assisted by Andrew Weale—and theater writing doesn't get much richer than this. Dexter worked and mingled with the greatest talents of his day: Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright, Rudolf Nureyev, Paul Scofield, Richard Burton, Stephen Sondheim, Maria Callas, Anthony Hopkins, Kenneth Tynan, and Maggie Smith, among fabled others. We follow his early mullings and musings about productions to be launched, as well as about rehearsals, fights, and sackings. Working often with a nearly bare stage to draw out the audience's imagination, Dexter strives to bring freshness to each work while not getting in the way of the talent at hand. Meanwhile, he has the actor-manager's passion for budgets. As he says when the producers waffle about hiring him for M. Butterfly, ``No call. They don't want me. I am difficult, British, homosexual, expensive—and whilst I can, with modified rapture, admit to the first three charges, the last is deeply wounding.'' Many inspiring moments prime the reader with hope for a biography—as well as for a clearer spelling-out of Dexter's stagecraft. (Illustrations)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-87830-035-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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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