A feisty memoir by one of America's most gifted actresses. Although movie fans might know her best as the pushy mother of Dick Van Dyke in Bye Bye Birdie (a part she played when she was in her 30s), theater buffs have long revered Stapleton for her power in parts ranging from the heavily dramatic (Lillian Hellman's Toys in the Attic) to the wildly comic (Neil Simon's Plaza Suite, in which she played three roles). Personally, she was known as a very outspoken lady with a roller-coaster private life. Now Stapleton, with celebrity coauthor Scovell, has put all sides of her personality on display in this fascinating autobiography. Despite her unconventional looks and figure (about which she's very hard on herself), Stapleton leapt to stardom quite young, when Tennessee Williams took a chance on this relatively unknown actress by casting her for the lead in The Rose Tattoo, a part he had written for Anna Magnani. It was an exciting time in the theater, and Stapleton knew, and tells wonderful anecdotes about, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, and many others. We see her move with apparent ease from theater to television to film, eventually winning several Tonys, an Emmy, and an Oscar. Writing in a pleasing conversational tone, Stapleton is also candid and refreshingly unapologetic about the darker sides of her life: her phobias (multiple), her drinking (heavy, for many years), and her relationships (varied, including one with the legendary George Abbott, from the time he was 81 until he was 91, when he left her for a younger woman); but throughout the rockiest portions of her life, the reader feels the thrill she still gets from her work. Stapleton has written an autobiography reminiscent of her best performances: brash, peppery, sometimes sad, sometimes hilarious, and always involving. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-81092-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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