Thomas is intent on celebrating the talent and career of Hartman, but he offers little conclusive insight into what was all...
An admiring, often granular report on the life and tragic death of comedian and Saturday Night Live veteran Phil Hartman (1948-1998), a man “adored by millions and slain in his prime.”
Chicago Sun-Times arts/entertainment writer Thomas (The Second City Unscripted: Revolution and Revelation at the World-Famous Comedy Theater, 2009) uses a combination of previously published materials, police reports, letters, and firsthand interviews with family members and famous comedians—including Jay Leno and Julia Sweeney—to put together a chronological narrative of the life and murder of the beloved comedian. Hartman was the star of the NBC sitcom NewsRadio, the voice of several classic roles on The Simpsons and an eight-year veteran of SNL, where he was nicknamed “The Glue” for his versatility and skill at keeping the cast cohesive. At 49, Hartman was murdered in his sleep by his third wife, Brynn, who killed herself several hours later. Thomas begins with exhaustive quantitative details from Hartman’s childhood—such as a nearly full list of his middle school report card grades—but the pace and quality of the book pick up once it moves into Hartman’s adult life. Readers will be entertained by learning the lesser-known facts about the beginning of his career—Hartman did a stint designing album covers for high-profile clients like Crosby, Stills & Nash for his brother’s production company—and the illustrative anecdotes of the Hollywood and New York comedy scenes in the 1980s and ’90s. While Thomas provides some clues about Hartman’s often guarded personality, large questions about his personal life and untimely death go unaddressed.
Thomas is intent on celebrating the talent and career of Hartman, but he offers little conclusive insight into what was all too clearly a troubled marriage. Fans will likely find it an entertaining but ultimately unsatisfying read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-02796-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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