An enlightening, richly detailed and suggestively disturbing look at the American Dream and one of its truest dreamers.
Eliot (Song of Brooklyn: An Oral History of America’s Favorite Borough, 2008, etc.) charts the less-than-stellar career of Ronald Reagan, the actor.
The late president was once a perennial second banana of middling looks and talent who dependably and forgettably assayed roles as the hero’s best friend in dozens of B movies during Hollywood’s Golden Age. This was, of course, before finding his true métier as a public speaker and political force in the tumultuous early days of Hollywood unions, most notably the Screen Actors Guild. Eliot paints the young Reagan as a Midwestern model of Rockwellian rectitude, a genial cipher with an unquestioning devotion to family, heartland values and a knack for self-promotion. Local celebrity as an athlete and radio sports announcer led to an undistinguished career in motion pictures, with the exceptions of his roles in Knute Rockne, All American and King’s Row, both of which interestingly found him declaiming classic dialogue from the sickbed. Eliot delves deeply into the precariousness of Reagan’s finances and ego during this period, as film after film failed to establish him as an A-list star and his marriage to the mercurial actress Jane Wyman ended in humiliating divorce. The image of Reagan pontificating about current events, filling the house with pipe smoke while Wyman writhed in crushing boredom, is a particularly poignant one. Much of the narrative focuses on Reagan’s self-actualization as a political animal through his deep involvement with SAG and its role in the blacklist and various other scandals, such as its underhanded dealing with Lew Wasserman’s MCA in negotiating residuals for its members. This occasionally dry material illustrates Reagan’s fuzzy drift from liberal Democrat to conservative Republican, as well as an apparently innate ability to cover his tracks with his aw-shucks charm and selective memory. The book ends with a determined Nancy Davis, herself a failed actress, steering her new beau toward a more socially desirable set of friends—well-connected, well-heeled conservatives—looking for a new pony to back after the flameouts of Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater.
An enlightening, richly detailed and suggestively disturbing look at the American Dream and one of its truest dreamers.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-40512-8
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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