Meade (Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?, 1988, etc.) returns to the Jazz Age with this bio of the great filmmaker and actor Joseph Frank ``Buster'' Keaton, timed to coincide with the centennial of his birth. Warning readers from the outset that she is focusing on his life rather than his films, Meade retells Keaton's story in somewhat more detail than previous biographers. The actor was born to Joe and Myra Keaton, unsuccessful medicine-show performers who became unsuccessful parents. But Keaton (and the physically violent stunts his father performed on him) enlivened their moribund act and made them vaudeville stars. Meade goes into copious detail in recounting the comedian's literally knockabout infancy and childhood and offers perfunctory attempts to situate him in a world before mass media. She chronicles his meteoric rise in the nascent movie industry, his working relationship with Roscoe ``Fatty'' Arbuckle, and Arbuckle's decline in the wake of his trials in the alleged manslaughter of starlet Virginia Rappe. Meade closely traces the consequences of Keaton's disastrous marriage to Natalie Talmadge and the sordid history of his in-laws. She recounts the harrowing downfall that accompanied his ill-advised decision to sign with MGM at the end of the silent era (and reconfirms the belief that Irving Thalberg deserved some blame for the destruction of Keaton's career). After the dismal times of the late '30s and '40s, Keaton rebounded thanks in no small part to the advent of television. Meade is the first Keaton biographer to detail his prickly relationship with film buff Raymond Rohauer; to give the devil his due, the obnoxious Rohauer emerges with considerable credit for saving Keaton's films from oblivion. One wishes that despite her warning Meade would talk more about the films and their making. The failure to do so leaves a large hole in the center of this account. A competent biography, seldom stirring but highly informative.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017337-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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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