Not very stylish biography of Harrison (1908-90), by Wapshott (Peter O'Toole, 1984). Born Reginald Carey Harrison, the future Henry Higgins was a sickly boy, ``cosseted and nursed by his mother and spoilt by his two sisters, who treated him as a doll to pet and coddle''—which, Wapshott says, set the pattern for his lifelong lack of deep male friendships and need for six wives. While he became a leading Shavian, Harrison found Shakespeare's language too much to handle, never played the Bard after failing as a messenger in Richard III, and, instead, achieved acclaim for his urbanity as a light comedian—although he later stretched himself for his praised Caesar in the Burtons' Cleopatra, for Pirandello, and for the odd serious role. For all the love the world bestowed on him, he apparently was a rude, abysmally self-centered husband who crushed his wives and tromped on his fellow actors. The two great tragedies of his life were the suicide of his mistress, actress Carole Landis, while he was married to Lilli Palmer, and the death from myeloid leukemia of his third wife, Kay Kendall. Harrison kept the fatal nature of her illness a secret from Kendall, who also had been his mistress while he was married to Palmer, who divorced Harrison so that he could marry Kendall for her last year or so, with plans for remarriage once Kendall was dead. When they did not remarry, and Harrison downplayed Palmer's kindness in his autobiography (Rex, 1973, lightly updated in his A Damned Serious Business, 1990), Palmer set the truth straight in her own autobiography. Later, Terrence Rattigan wrote After Lydia, a play about Palmer's last days with Harrison, and Harrison played himself (as a crabbed literary critic) on stage—but only after defanging the critic into a jolly fine chap. Wapshott tells all this rather solemnly, allowing Harrison's waspishness to take on an irresistible gleam through the windowpane prose. (Sixteen pages of b&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-670-83947-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
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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