Show biz biographer Gottfried (All His Jazz: The Life and Death of Bob Fosse, 1990, etc.) once again condescends to his subject. As usual, Gottfried has done a solid job of researching and crisply retelling the life story of Danny Kaye, born David Kaminski in 1913 to Ukrainian-Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn. He capably situates Kaye, who began his career in the Catskills, at ``a historic moment [when] the low clowns of burlesque and the elegant monologuists of vaudeville...were being replaced by the cooler, more remote entertainers of radio and the movies.'' Kaye himself, though he exuded warmth onstage, was, in Gottfried's depiction, emotionally distant in his personal life, and he gained his greatest fame as a carefully nonethnic, childlike performer attuned to the mores of suburban, family-oriented postwar America—though he himself was thoroughly urbane. His stage successes in the early 1940s and such movie vehicles as The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) and Hans Christian Andersen (1952) never really captured Kaye's unique combination of gifts; Gottfried rightly points to the sophisticated mÇlange of comic songs, soft-shoe dancing, and audience-pleasing patter in his nightclub act, which triumphed at the London Palladium in 1948, as more expressive of his abilities. Not that Gottfried appears to think much of those abilities; he quotes extensively from negative assessments of Kaye's work and is similarly free with bitchy comments from people who knew the entertainer, regaling us endlessly with stories of Kaye's ego, cruelty, and strained marriage with writer Sylvia Fine, depicted as a union of professional convenience. He does take time to convincingly refute Donald Spoto's much-ballyhooed claim that Kaye and Laurence Olivier were lovers, but other than that, no gossip is too mean-spirited to repeat. The author seems almost to relish Kaye's sad professional and personal decline before his death in 1987. Comprehensive—except for any spark of human sympathy.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-86494-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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