A depressing and annoying account of the troubled life of actor River Phoenix. Phoenix's parents, surnamed Bottom, were the sort of earnest but ludicrous hippies who in 1970 could give their firstborn the name ``River Bottom'' without noticing its inauspiciousness. Within a couple of years the Bottoms had joined a sinister pseudo- Christian cult, the Children of God, under whose edicts River was apparently introduced to sexual relations at age four. Renamed the Phoenixes by the cult, the family wound up in Venezuela as missionaries. By the time they dropped out, six-year-old River had become the indigent family's principal breadwinner, singing in the street for coins. Soon the Phoenixes moved to L.A. to try to capitalize on River's charisma and talent. There followed appearances in TV commercials and series, and eventually success in feature films such as Stand by Me and Running on Empty. In public, Phoenix was a clean-living vegan and environmental activist, but privately he drank, smoked, and at least sporadically used drugs. Given the childhood sexual abuse, the fact that he spent much of his adolescence in front of a camera, and his parents' conviction that he had a mission to reform the world, it's not hard to imagine the pressures and insecurities that ultimately led to Phoenix's death by multiple-drug overdose at age 23. Glatt (Rage & Roll, 1993) gives only an occasional inkling that he recognizes Phoenix's appeal: The actor gave some edgy, brilliant performances, and he wrote his own finest scene, the narcoleptic hustler's campfire soul-baring in My Own Private Idaho. Glatt did not speak to most of Phoenix's intimates and colleagues in any depth, when he spoke to them at all; much of his information is taken from magazine and newspaper articles, with no attempt at a unifying point of view. Puffy amusement for celebrity-trauma fans that lacks any fondness for its subject. (Photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 15, 1995
ISBN: 1-55611-426-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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