TV's beloved ``Ed Norton'' finally gets his due in a breezy, often incisive biography. Considering the fact that Art Carney's creation in The Honeymooners shows no signs of diminishing popularity more than 40 years after his debut, and that his work outside the series has shown extraordinary range from low comedy to darkest tragedy, peaking in his Oscar-winning performance in Harry and Tonto, it's startling to realize that no book on his life has been published until now. Perhaps it was the actor's own shy and reclusive nature that prevented other attempts. But Carney is fortunate to have found his biographer in Starr, TV columnist for the New York Post. This is a brief book by current standards but so densely packed with information that it's hard to imagine what might have been missed. Starr traces Carney's professional career from his days as an impressionist and radio actor, to stardom on The Jackie Gleason Show, and on to his emergence from Gleason's shadow into a remarkable solo career. Starr also turns a sensitive eye to Carney's rockier personal life: Public triumphs were constantly undermined by alcoholism and bouts of deep depression. Starr appears to have talked to virtually everyone who ever knew or worked with Carney (though not Carney himself), and he wisely lets these friends and acquaintances tell their own stories. He keeps his own voice clear but refreshingly impartial. Art Carney emerges from these pages as a kind, gentle man who, tragically, has seldom found the love for himself that his millions of fans give him without qualification. Starr's perceptive biography presents its subject as a man who became legendary, not through hype or self-promotion, but through the sheer force of his talent. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 24, 1997
ISBN: 0-88064-173-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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