An unusual story of a life lived among a galaxy of stars, told with enough insight and intelligence that even those who...
A famous director recalls his boyhood and working life as the son of the beautiful Warner Brother’s movie star Geraldine Fitzgerald.
At age 15, Lindsay-Hogg knew exactly what he wanted out of life. Following his first stint in the theater in 1956, when he spoke one line in The Taming of the Shrew, he set his sights on a career in theater, film and television. After querying his mother on possible stage names, she casually mentioned how some people thought Orson Welles was his real father. His mother denied it, but just enough to create a mysterious script for the author’s life. True to his dream, the author forged a career in the entertainment world where recurring hints of his connection to Welles resurfaced at odd times during his life. In the ’60s, he directed a British rock ’n’ roll show and developed an unusual technique for filming the bands. He went on to work with many of the greats, including the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Supremes. Lindsay-Hogg began working for BBC television during the ’70s, “working with the stars of the time on dramas written by equally stellar playwrights.” The author’s story is a riveting insider look at popular culture, from his boyhood in Santa Monica, while his mother was under contract to Warner Brothers, through his direction of The Normal Heart in 1985. Lindsay-Hogg’s descriptive vignettes reveal tasty tidbits about the famous musicians, actors and cultural icons of the time.
An unusual story of a life lived among a galaxy of stars, told with enough insight and intelligence that even those who dismiss celebrity memoirs should enjoy this jaunt through the glitz.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59468-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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