Entertaining and well-written, a worthwhile read for Ball’s fans who can stomach the sorrows she endured after her heyday....
A dismal glimpse of a legendary comedienne’s reclusive retirement, told in a series of engaging anecdotes by a fawning confidant.
Tannen, who befriended Lucille Ball during her final ten years (1979–89), focuses on her professional decline and her marriage to “second rate comic” Gary Morton. An I Love Lucy fanatic since childhood who was four decades younger than the star, Tannen claims to be Gary’s sister’s husband’s cousin––“a third cousin twice removed or something like that.” Despite this distant relation, he became Ball’s close friend and a credible spokesperson, winning the approval of her daughter, Lucie Arnaz. At her best, Ball made Tannen laugh, especially when she failed to recognize Katharine Hepburn on the phone and made “one of those contorted gestures with her mouth the way Lucy Ricardo would do when she was caught doing something naughty.” But Ball’s best rarely appears. She merely tolerated visits from her children and obsessed over her ex-husband, Desi Arnaz. By 1986, her “all too familiar trademark and gestures seemed tired and her legendary comic timing just wasn’t there” when she starred in her last sitcom, Life with Lucy, a humiliating flop. An outmoded has-been unable to get work, Ball dreaded showing her aging face in public and struggled to maintain her identity during her forced retirement. Divulging both Ball’s clinical depression and her lust for pranks, Tannen reveals the similarities and discords between the real woman and her merry on-stage persona. Refraining from scandal, but not from name-dropping and melodrama, the author spices up Ball’s humdrum retirement-hours of playing backgammon and watching Wheel of Fortune, with cameos from Shirley MacLaine and Liza Minnelli.
Entertaining and well-written, a worthwhile read for Ball’s fans who can stomach the sorrows she endured after her heyday. Those more intent on family drama and dirt on Desi should check out the more sensational accounts of Kathleen Bradley and Tom Gilbert.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28753-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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