In a coarse memoir, a longtime friend of the 1950s movie idol recalls his rise to fame, obsession with death, and—in exasperatingly great detail—his bisexual exploits. Gilmore succeeds at conveying the sources of Dean's vulnerability and his preoccupation with death, elements that fueled both Dean's screen persona and his personal life. He adored his devoted mother, who died when Dean was nine; his father disowned him as a weakling. Also effective are Gilmore's recollections of the mass voyeurism that Dean's violent death engendered. He reconstructs dialogue entertainingly (``Some people just think square, man,'' Dean once told him), and Dean's ongoing use of drink and drugs has a ``Gee, Officer Krupke'' innocence to it, limited largely to reefer, bennies, beer, and a flirtation with brandy in an attempt to steal some of Brando's thunder as ``Hollywood's Number One Bad Boy.'' But these vivid glimpses of Dean are not enough to counter some bad writing. There are uncomfortable metaphors (``The future looked bright and wide open as a prairie''), tangled syntax (``As a boy during the Second World War I wrote on and off for close to half a century''), and much puffery (``No truer maverick have I ever known''). Add to that too many graphic (and highly Anglo-Saxon) descriptions of Dean's and friends' many varieties of bisexual sex—two-plus-one, with lotion, in black leather to Edith Piaf- -and the book becomes more of an assault than a requiem. Had any of these passages contained the wit of Gilmore's description of Dean's sexual proclivities—''Not particularly gay''—they would have been more palatable. Though Gilmore offers insights into the star's troubled life, this book is mainly for Dean fans and devotees of celebrity sex. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-56025-146-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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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