This biography of the great comedienne spends too many pages on the early Lucy we didn't know and don't care much about. Brady (Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker, 1984) traces Ball's life from her somewhat unsettled childhood in upstate New York through her modeling and acting career in Manhattan, her time as a Goldwyn girl, and her television successes, as well as personal and career failures with Desi Arnaz, and her reclusive last years. The biographer leaves few stones unturned in presenting Lucy as a woman who worked hard, loved harder, expected much of those around her, and was never satisfied with the adoration her fans bestowed upon her. Though the book is full of interesting and illuminating material—Desi's blatant affairs, the occasional violence of the Arnaz marriage, the complex negotiations that took place behind closed doors to produce ``I Love Lucy,'' in its day the most popular television show in America—Brady waits far too long before getting to the Lucy of TV that most readers will be able to remember and recognize. In particular, the almosts and could-have-beens of Ball's disappointing movie career receive too much attention; and although the author's access to Lucy's childhood and young-adult friends is impressive, she uses too many of their merely anecdotal stories. To be sure, there are nice moments, including Lucy's single date with Henry Fonda, her fastidious rehearsing of comedy bits, and her 1953 appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee (her grandfather had the whole family register as socialists in the '30s), but there's an overabundance of material that doesn't propel the story or offer significant insight. Too many fits and starts prevent this biography from making Lucy come alive. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1994
ISBN: 0-7868-6007-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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