Kudos to the author for mostly avoiding her family’s “curse,” but the book, occasionally revelatory, is weighed down by...
Actress-turned-author Hemingway (Mariel’s Kitchen, 2009) ponders her life and career in light of her famous family’s self-destructive history.
Born just after her famous-author grandfather, Ernest, committed suicide in 1961, Mariel Hemingway was immediately thrust into a family legacy historically marked by suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction and mental illness. Her parents both struggled with alcohol dependency, while her sisters Muffet and Margot would fight depression their entire lives (Margot eventually died of a suicidal drug overdose at age 42). Although she grew up in rural Idaho, Mariel couldn’t resist entering the glamorous world of show business as a teenager, initially riding the coattails of Margot, who had rocketed to quick fame as a model in New York City. But with a breakout role in Woody Allen’s 1979 comedy Manhattan, Mariel’s star began eclipsing her sister’s. Mariel would then go on to a respectable career as a midlist actress in the late 1970s and 1980s, riding hit movies like Star 80 and Superman IV. In her 20s, Hemingway also found herself in one tension-filled relationship after another, first with legendary screenwriter Robert Towne, then with one of the founders of the Hard Rock Café chain—not to mention a few brief celebrity flings. Although the memoir is ostensibly about how the author conquered the so-called “Hemingway Curse,” it’s never really explicit as to how this was accomplished. However, it’s clear that Mariel never quite bought into the Hollywood dream or her own celebrity. She maturely managed her life and career without too many psychic scars and luckily ended up bypassing addiction to controlled substances or alcohol (although she did have a predilection for black coffee binges). By the end of the book, we find her psychically well-adjusted enough to be the author of a self-help book and this generically positive but fairly uneventful celebrity memoir.
Kudos to the author for mostly avoiding her family’s “curse,” but the book, occasionally revelatory, is weighed down by self-discovery platitudes.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-941393-23-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Regan Arts
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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