Surely the breeziest account yet of the Blacklist.
Slapdash memoir from a once-blacklisted actor.
Knox is a method actor, but the detail, insight, and introspection that define that school of acting hardly characterize his autobiography. Knox was born on Coney Island in 1922, the illegitimate child of Russian Jews. He behaved, he says, like “a little shit,” the first of many crude terms he scatters throughout. Home life in the Depression may have influenced Knox to become an actor, but he doesn’t speculate on his motivation, as method actors often do. Instead, he says he chose his career “out of the blue,” an observation to make Lee Strasberg bang his head against the fourth wall. In short order, Knox appears on the New York stage, then in Hollywood films as a Warner Bros. contract player. His pace now revved up to the speed of a whizbang, B-level gangster film, Knox recalls making I Walk Alone, Knock on Any Door, and White Heat in the late ’40s and early ’50s. Knox’s tales of lotus land and his style go beyond the stale: “Legend has it,” Knox writes, that—gasp!—Lana Turner was discovered at the counter of Schwab’s Drugstore. Knox works with left-wing writers Marc Blitzstein and Bertolt Brecht and—zip!—the actor is blacklisted. No matter. Whoosh! Knox flies to Europe, where, over four decades, he works in films, playing supporting roles and dubbing or coaching actors who don’t speak English. Pleasures on La Dolce Vita are often carnal, he recalls, observing delicately, that “Sooner rather than later, costars fuck,” and that “In the normal course of pursuing pussy, Roman men are relentless.” Tales about work with Anna Magnani, Eli Wallach, and Orson Welles are more engaging and tasteful.
Surely the breeziest account yet of the Blacklist.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-56025-575-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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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