A lightweight entertainment that demonstrates the old saw that life can truly be stranger than fiction.
The actor who played “the most interesting man in the world” is more interesting than you might have anticipated.
Goldsmith’s star turn came late in his career, in his late 60s, when, “living like a hobo,” he was called to audition for a Dos Equis beer campaign. He was dubious about how “a Jewish guy from the Bronx” could be a pitchman for a Mexican beer, but he was not exactly swimming in competing offers. “They want a Hemingway kind of guy,” his agent told him; they also wanted storytelling improvisation at the audition, asking only that it end with the line, “And that’s how I arm-wrestled Fidel Castro.” Goldsmith’s memoir reads like a collection of tall tales, though the author insists they are true, and it suggests that he spent his whole life preparing to audition for the role he would never have imagined. The spirit of adventure channels Hemingway, while the tone (of the commercials as well) owes more to Fernando Lamas, or “Fern, as I came to know him,” who served as a mentor of masculinity for the younger actor. The adventures extend to the bedroom, where his lovers included the semifamous (Tina Louise), the anonymous, and the pseudonymous—e.g., “Wind Nymph.” With a flair for name-dropping, Goldsmith recalls his rivalry with “Dusty” Hoffman, with whom he often competed for parts and to whom he prophesied, “I’m going make it and you’re not.” (Oops! “Over the next forty years, I would have those words to eat.”) The author has lived a colorful life, to be sure, and he relates it in anecdotal chapters of a couple of pages each, but no publisher would have been interested if a chance commercial break hadn’t given him his breakthrough. In the wake of that, Michael Jordan asked to have a picture taken with him, and he was invited to Camp David as “a birthday surprise for President Barack Obama.”
A lightweight entertainment that demonstrates the old saw that life can truly be stranger than fiction.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98623-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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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