The facts are here, but readers seeking a nuanced portrait of the actor should look elsewhere.
The short, shocking life of the Switchblade Kid.
Michaud charts the strange life and career of Sal Mineo (1939–1976), the boyish actor who attained instant iconic status as a troubled teen in the 1955 classic Rebel Without a Cause—only to find himself washed up by his early 30s, crippled by debt, reduced to dinner- and community-theater work and increasingly identified with a sordid gay demimonde before being fatally stabbed outside his home. The author takes a dry, journalistic approach to this grim, sensational material, and while his restraint may be admirable, it makes Mineo something of a cipher. The sweet neighborhood boy made good transforms into a sexually voracious man preoccupied by transgressive stories of perversion and rape, and the reader is never quite sure how that happened. Typecast after Rebel, Mineo struggled to branch out into more mature and varied performances, scoring with projects like The Gene Krupa Story (1959) and 1960’s Exodus (for which he received his second Oscar nomination, after Rebel), but Hollywood lost interest. Mineo would pursue one doomed project after another in a bid to rehabilitate his image. The failure of these projects is unsurprising—they invariably focused on exceedingly dark, sexually provocative subject matter completely at odds with Mineo’s image and prevailing audience taste. Mineo was engrossed in his own homosexual awakening in this period, but Michaud is hesitant to explore the connection or to examine Mineo’s psychology or artistic process in any meaningful way. Instead, the author reports with cold objectivity on the projects’ financing woes and Mineo’s many romantic entanglements, including trysts with actress Jill Haworth and teen idol Bobby Sherman. Mineo’s murder, apparently the result of a botched robbery attempt, was a sadly appropriate conclusion to the talented actor’s messy, mismanaged life and career.
The facts are here, but readers seeking a nuanced portrait of the actor should look elsewhere.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-71868-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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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