An insightful, sharp Hollywood memoir that will appeal to fans and newcomers alike.
Academy Award–winning actress Grant recounts the ups and downs of her professional and personal lives.
Grant (born Lyova Haskell Rosenthal) was practically raised on the stage. Beginning at the Metropolitan Opera House, 4-year-old Grant was chosen to play a kidnapped child in L’Oracolo, but she broke scene during the opera’s climax as the star tenor was killed onstage. Grant’s precocious and heartwarmingly earnest attempt to warn the actor that he was about to be stabbed in the back won the affection of the audience. The author’s misstep, however, proved that she had a natural stage presence and that she was fearless and headlong, even if, as in this instance, it was foolhardy. After an unsuccessful attempt at a singing career, Grant truly found her footing at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where she learned method acting from Herbert Berghof, a student of Sanford Meisner. She even did a stint at the famed Actors Studio. Though Grant may not be a household name today, the resilience of her career outlasted the 12-year period when she was blacklisted by HUAC for her political affiliations (her first husband, playwright Arnold Manoff, was a registered communist), and she became one of the most respected actresses of her generation. Among her most well-known roles were in Valley of the Dolls, In the Heat of the Night, Portnoy’s Complaint and Shampoo, which earned her an Oscar for best supporting actress, though she’d previously been nominated for her motion picture debut, Detective Story, in 1951. Rife with appearances from some of Hollywood’s biggest names, including an unsuccessful date with Marlon Brando, Grant’s career proves that the elusive and oft-sought-after second chance can not only be had, it can be triumphantly redeeming.
An insightful, sharp Hollywood memoir that will appeal to fans and newcomers alike.Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16930-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
