Ballard is an expert at her craft, but it’s not the craft of autobiography.
An amiable iron lady of show biz offers an archetypal theatrical memoir, covering more than six decades onstage.
Eighty-year-old Ballard proudly presents the curriculum vitae of a genuine trouper, beginning with a song or two delivered in a hometown Chinese restaurant. (She’s still available for bookings.) This stalwart entertainment warrior has performed in vaudeville, nightclubs, summer stock, TV, Broadway and Vegas, consistently delivering songs and comedy with considerable style. She has worked with flashy headliners and steadfast supporting players, stars and dimly recalled second bananas of bygone days. Remember Alice Ghostley, Jean Sablon, Sylvia Syms or Billy DeWolf? Ballard recalls them fondly. She’s also run into celebrated folk like Mother Teresa. She rejected advances from Phil Silvers, but was more receptive to young Marlon Brando. For a stage-struck Italian girl from Cleveland, Ballard has come a long way, despite the vagaries of the biz, some flop sweat and her share of failures. Over the decades, rarely out of work, she’s paid her dues for a performing life. Seasoned with just a touch of family angst, a bit of payback for a couple of bad actors and a little vamping, it’s a traditional theatrical memoir in the with-pride-and-humility-how-lucky-I’ve-been genre. Co-author Hesselman does nothing to lift the prose above the ordinary, or to prune the platitudes. “Live life to the fullest,” Ballard advises. “How life circles around and mixes together,” she marvels. And, wouldn’t you know it, she forthrightly believes that “all people have the right to be happy.”
Ballard is an expert at her craft, but it’s not the craft of autobiography.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-8230-8478-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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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