This unfettered tell-all will prove nostalgic for those who manage to remember being there and engrossing for readers...
How drugs, sex, and celebrity shenanigans made 254 West 54th St. infamous on the 1980s Manhattan nightclub circuit.
When entrepreneur and author Fleischman was 10, his parents took him to the Copacabana; from that point, he admits that everything “onward propelled me on a trajectory toward Studio 54.” For four years, the author was the “ringleader” of the iconic disco, which quickly became known for its glitzy, star-studded clientele and nightly drug-addled debauchery. As owner and distinguished host, his job became his life and a great part of a heady journey “that nearly killed me.” Fleischman also chronicles his life before Studio 54, which featured significant commercial property acquisitions and a first long-term relationship, all set against a backdrop of sexual revolution and the game-changing Stonewall Riots. The author notes that the process of purchasing the nightclub building came with a sketchy liquor license deal and a sale contingent on heeding the counsel of the former owners, imprisoned for tax evasion, from their jail cells. The club’s reopening in 1981 featured a distinguished guest list, as well as 10,000 eager partiers and voracious young celebrities. With sharply drawn detail from an obvious insider’s vantage point, Fleischman graphically brings to life seasons of provocative parties and notorious “Rubber Room” antics, all of which cemented the club’s racy reputation as the premier destination in Manhattan. The stories of DJs, models, live performances, early Madonna, and scandal flow with the juiciness of a name-dropping gossip column. The hangover, however, proved a harsh reality check since, by the author’s third year of operation, his swift decline into drug addiction and mental instability became a potentially fatal reality: “I’d take Valium to go to sleep, wake up around three in the afternoon, do several lines of coke to get myself going and repeat the routine of yet another day.”
This unfettered tell-all will prove nostalgic for those who manage to remember being there and engrossing for readers wishing they were.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945572-57-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Vireo/Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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