Veteran biographer Secrest moves, logically, from Leonard Bernstein (1994) to one of his collaborators and friends—and one of the undoubted giants of the American theater—Stephen Sondheim. Like his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, Sondheim has vehement detractors and vociferous defenders; Secrest is quite clearly in the latter group. Born in New York in 1930, Sondheim is the son of well-to-do German Jews. But when their marriage disintegrated while Stephen was still a child, the boy found himself a pawn in his mother’s machinations. As Secrest makes clear, the scars from that experience stayed with Sondheim for a long time, occasionally finding their way into his creative work. Despite personal travails as a youth, Sondheim enjoyed a pretty nearly unbroken road to theatrical success, being virtually adopted by the Hammersteins, making his Broadway debut at 27 with the lyrics for West Side Story and not actually having a failure until his second show as sole composer-lyricist, the legendary Anyone Can Whistle. Secrest has had the great advantage of cooperation from her subject. More than any previous work on Sondheim, this book has the benefit of early reminiscences and access to its subject’s apprentice work all the way back to his high-school years. Yet Sondheim remains a somewhat emotionally distant figure, not surprising since his guardedness seems to be one of his most prominent traits. Regrettably, although there is much material here to fascinate both Sondheim addicts and theater fans, Secrest fails to organize it coherently. Although there are some engaging stories about the creation of such classics as Company, Pacific Overtures, and Sunday in the Park with George, the book rambles with a ramshackle thrown-together feeling and with awkward run-on sentences. And not surprisingly given that her subject is still working hard at 68, Secrest’s effort doesn’t so much end as stop abruptly. Some genuine insights into one of our living masters, but a disappointingly disorganized work with a surfeit of dollar-book Freud and Jung. (95 photos, not seen) (Literary Guild selection; author tour)
Pub Date: June 14, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-44817-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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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