Substantially rewritten, expanded and retranslated, this volume supersedes the late actor's 1989 All I Need Is Love. Kinski, who died in 1991, had a richly deserved reputation as one of the bad boys of European cinema, a volatile personality both on screen and off. Kinski offers vivid recollections of a horrific childhood. Born in 1926, he grew up in Danzig in suffocating poverty, his father a failed pharmacist who couldn't support his wife and four children. At 16 Kinski found himself drafted into the Wehrmacht as as a battered Germany threw adolescents into battle in a last-ditch attempt to stave off defeat. Kinski deserted repeatedly and ended up a British POW. When he was released, he returned to Germany, where in a desultory fashion he began to pursue a career in theater. Eventually, he developed a reputation as an enfant terrible of considerable talent and graduated to film work. He worked his way through three wives, having one child by each (including his famous daughter, Nastassja). The overwhelming majority of the book's pages are devoted to a seemingly endless string of sexual experiences: Kinski has sex with virtually every woman he meets. He even has a heated encounter with his sister. Unfortunately, he lacks the pornographic imagination and richly inventive language of Henry Miller, who seems to hover over Kinski's shoulder. The actor repeatedly collapses into sentimental clichÇ, straining for richer metaphor but to no avail. Moreover, he uses this autobiography as an opportunity to heap abuse on nearly everyone he ever worked with. Combine a monstrously huge ego (Kinski compares himself, favorably, to Jesus Christ) with an endless catalog of couplings, and the result is a dully repetitive and ultimately repellent reading experience.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-86744-6
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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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