McCabe is uniquely well qualified to write a Cagney biography: Not only was he the ghost on Cagney's autobiography, but he also was the authorized biographer of George M. Cohan (1973), whom Cagney famously portrayed in Yankee Doodle Dandy. McCabe draws heavily on his lengthy taped interviews with Cagney, with the result that this volume feels a bit like an extension of the actor's autobiography. Indeed, there are no major revelations here. Rather, this is a briskly written retelling of a somewhat familiar story—albeit a richer retelling than previous ones, thanks to the added texture that comes from Cagney's voice. Cagney grew up in relative poverty in New York City, the son of an alcoholic barman and a tough, no-nonsense mother (who taught her sons how to box). Some of the best moments in the book come in recounting Cagney's happy, hardscrabble youth. A compulsively modest and private man, he seems to have been ill-suited for the public life of a movie star; he took up acting because it paid well. He seldom attends Hollywood parties, spending most of his spare time reading and, later, painting and farming (his true ambition had always been to be a farmer). He brought a fiery intelligence to his acting, and McCabe, an ex-actor himself, has some nicely judged analyses of his subject's earlier work, concentrating on technique with an acuity that one seldom finds in star biographies. Regrettably, as the book goes on, McCabe offers fewer of these insights. One also wishes for more in-depth research on a wide range of matters, from the daily routine of the Warner Bros. film factory to the background of Cagney's family, from his legal wrangles with the studio to his political evolution from quasi-socialist to conservative Republican. The definitive Cagney biography has yet to be written, but this is a workmanlike and eminently readable effort. (100 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 5, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-44607-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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