Stout, readable story about how a nice guy got his acting chops and became one of Hollywood’s greats.
An actor’s life, presented admiringly—after all, the subject is a plain-spoken American beau ideal.
Jimmy Stewart (1908–97), firmly lodged in the motion-picture pantheon throughout the studio-contract days and beyond, was a Princetonian, a modest war hero, sincerely Presbyterian, hardworking, happily married, politically conservative and a preternaturally gifted actor. As depicted by veteran Hollywood biographer Eliot (Cary Grant, 2004, etc.) in a full and fulsome portrait, he truly had a wonderful life. Discounting sojourns in theatre and later in TV, the Hollywood artist enjoyed one of the great film careers, starring in some of the classic Capra and Hitchcock films. Supporting players in his life story include Henry Fonda (as best friend), dazzling Margaret Sullavan, flawless Grace Kelly (for female leads) and an all-star cast of performers, producers, directors and agents. This is the story of how Stewart got the work he wanted and about the making and the makers of movies. There’s the obligatory backlot gossip concerning libidinous actors in heat (apparently their natural state) and some emblematic tittle-tattle. (Stewart, for example, was obliged to allay suspicions of homosexuality by visiting MGM’s in-house bordello.) Eliot succumbs to Variety-style jargon (“helmer” or “body-mover” for “director”) and hyperbolic press-agent syntax (“Jimmy was about to be reborn into the stratosphere of cinematic starlight”) and purple prose (he “was busy diving into the deep waters of Dietrich’s ocean of sexual delights”). The biographer provides major film-plot synopses with sexual and theological implications most readers surely never considered. In a shot at scholarship, he provides footnotes (frequently listing annual Oscars) as well as endnotes (with insufficient citations for many assertions). Nonetheless, Eliot makes abundant errors in minor details. But this casual treatment of extraneous facts hardly interferes with a good story about the movies and one of its stars.
Stout, readable story about how a nice guy got his acting chops and became one of Hollywood’s greats.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-5221-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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