Despite some gratuitous name-dropping, a warm account full of laughs and love.
Actor Tucker’s follow-up memoir to Living in a Foreign Language: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Love in Italy (2007).
Best known for his role on L.A. Law, Tucker takes enormous pleasure in food, wine and friends, especially when all are to be found in Italy, where he and his wife, actress Jill Eikenberry, have a house in Umbria. The gregarious author enthusiastically writes about his enjoyment of all things Italian, especially mouthwatering meals. But when Jill’s mother, Lora, was widowed, a darker world began to intrude on their sunny semi-retirement. When Lora’s subsequent decline into dementia made independent living in Santa Barbara, Calif., impossible for her, they moved the elderly widow to a senior residence near the Manhattan apartment where the couple lived during part of the year. That arrangement proved unsatisfactory as well, and eventually she moved into an apartment across the hall from them. Tucker makes clear his misgivings about this proximity, and he ably captures his wife’s complicated feelings of guilt, responsibility and love. When his daughter Alison, an accomplished caterer, moved to Manhattan and took an apartment nearby and their son Max, a musician, moved in with her, Tucker realized that their new arrangement resembled the close, multigenerational family life so common in Italian society. The benefits were huge, with everyone supporting each other, and Alison brought the added bonus of terrific food. Tucker and his wife were able to move ahead with a film they had been producing and appear in an off-off-Broadway musical. The author—whose sturdy ego is evident, as are his concerns about his privacy—presents himself more as a sympathetic observer than as a deeply involved participant in the mother-in-law project.
Despite some gratuitous name-dropping, a warm account full of laughs and love.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1921-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
