Actress Woronov (Wake for the Angels, 1994, not reviewed), best known today for her work with Paul Bartel and Roger Corman, recalls her early career as a film personality and hanger-on with Andy Warhol. Woronov grew up in a troubled family, her beautiful mother hooked on pills, her stepfather a likeable but cold doctor. As a child, she was prone to uncontrollable fits of rage and violence and apparently more than once came within an eyelash of being expelled from school. By the time she was an art major at Cornell, she was ripe for a radical change, and stumbling into the Warhol circle was at best a fortuitous accident. Once she met up with them, Woronov dropped out of college, running away to join the Warhol circus. The rest of the story is an unending parade of drugs, drugs, drugs, interlarded with tales of internecine warfare among the various groupies, wannabes, and central figures surrounding Warhol. ``Talent, of course, meant nothing to this crowd,'' she writes at one point. ``I was the only one who memorized my lines and no one even noticed.'' From the frantic and tedious goings-on, it's clear how such an achievement might have gone unremarked. Readers looking for some insight into the fascination that Warhol exerted on the underground scene of the '60s will come away from this slender volume unenlightened. What they will have received instead is a sort of drug-induced dime- store surrealism, a book for people who think that rock record liner notes are the pinnacle of literary achievement. And it takes itself so damned seriously. Dull, distasteful, depressing, and without the saving graces of humor and wry self-knowledge that have made Woronov such a delightful performer for Bartel. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1995
ISBN: 1-885203-21-7
Page Count: 252
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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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