A fleeting account of ambition tempered by experience, with special emphasis on reconciling past and present and finding a...
Celebrity biographer Eliot (Steve McQueen, 2011, etc.) highlights American actor and producer Michael Douglas, considering his life and career through a competitive lens.
The author proposes that Douglas was driven by both his parents’ divorce and his legendary father Kirk’s career—the son constantly sought to emerge from his father’s shadow. In addition to covering Kirk’s formative years as the child of Russian Jewish immigrants and his journey in Hollywood, Eliot examines Michael’s struggles and successes, his personal and professional relationships (with emphasis on his marriage to Catherine Zeta-Jones as the height of his personal life) and his diagnosis and recovery from cancer. References to his father, replete with discouraging remarks, punctuate the narrative in sometimes heavy-handed ways, though Eliot concludes by surmising an eventual peace between father and son. Readers seeking a deep, insightful examination of the actor will likely be disappointed, and casual, lazy descriptions hamper the writing. Of the role played by Melanie Griffith in Shining Through, Eliot remarks that her character “…is spying for America in the heart of Berlin during World War II and [is] somehow able to slip in and out of Germany more easily than a teenage hottie gets past security at a Justin Bieber concert.” Of Sharon Stone’s memorable turn in Basic Instinct: “One quick flash of her pubic hair would make her a star—if not at the morning-after water coolers, like Fatal Attraction, then in the night-before wet dreams of the film’s vast male viewers.” Despite such moments, film buffs will appreciate chapters on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the Oscar-winning film Douglas co-produced, as well as behind-the-scenes glimpses of such popular fare as Romancing the Stone and mentions of other stars, from Jack Nicholson to Danny DeVito.
A fleeting account of ambition tempered by experience, with special emphasis on reconciling past and present and finding a renewed sense of family.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-95236-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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