The title sums it up quite neatly: a self-indulgent, rambling and intermittently diverting ego parade.
Brilliantly sustained parody of a neurotic actress’s half of a marathon therapy session—oh, wait a minute, she’s not kidding?
Turner’s memoir reveals a terminally self-absorbed performer unable to distinguish profundity from trite self-affirmation. Tracey Ullman could turn this material into a dandy one-woman show, but the laughs provoked here are unintentional. Meandering anecdotes about various family members, Turner presumes, are rendered inherently fascinating by her celebrity. In a typical passage, she goes into excruciating detail about her daughter’s high-school graduation, jeopardized by an unfulfilled gym requirement. The hoped-for dirt on costars fails to materialize: She admits to a crush on Michael Douglas while making Romancing the Stone, calls out Nicolas Cage for his unpleasantness during the filming of Peggy Sue Got Married, and characterizes Body Heat lead William Hurt as mildly strange. Such restraint might appear admirable if only a) it did not make for such dull reading, and b) it seemed motivated by a sense of propriety rather than an overpowering desire to share with us All Things Kathleen. Hers is indeed an interesting life, marked by a peripatetic upbringing as the child of a U.S. Foreign Service officer, movie stardom, stage successes, struggles with rheumatoid arthritis and alcoholism. Unfortunately, these subjects are explored only insofar as they support the book’s main thrust: what a spunky, down-to-earth, talented, sensitive, intelligent person Turner is. Things improve when she focuses on her work; flashes of insight regarding the technical aspects of film acting whet the appetite for more. And Turner is an agreeable personality on the page, addressing the reader as “baby” and indulging in amusingly salty language. A diary covering her iconic work in Body Heat would have been delightful. This isn’t.
The title sums it up quite neatly: a self-indulgent, rambling and intermittently diverting ego parade.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-446-58112-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Springboard Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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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