Better than the usual run of actor memoirs and plenty of fun to boot.
The noted film actor and notorious bad boy hunkers down and tells a few tales of his life, some of which just may be true.
“Let me tell you about my testicle tuck,” writes Nolte by way of an opening gambit. There are plenty of other bodily points of interest, as well: for one thing, the author had a well-developed habit of smacking his head against hard objects, like the sides of cars, “to relieve a little stress.” Fortunately, he survived, having finally learned that “running my head into cars was signaling…I needed help.” As his memoir unwinds, it’s clear where some of the stress and self-destruction came from. Back in Iowa, life presented its own hardships in the form of a war-scarred father and a mother who fed Dexedrine to young Nick, who recalls that the so-called vitamin “would have me bouncing off the walls in no time, eager as hell to get to school and wreak whatever havoc I could.” Havoc is a useful keyword, for there are plenty of opportunities to watch it in play as Nolte stumbles into an acting career and finds that he’s good at it, even if his early work was dismissed as lunk-headed and wooden. Things got better with Karel Reisz’s Who’ll Stop the Rain (1978), the film version of Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, “an important film for me because I was able to display some depth as an actor and a complexity far beyond what The Deep revealed.” Nolte casts a gimlet eye on his performances and the circumstances surrounding them, performances that have included such brilliant work as the cynical football hero of North Dallas Forty but have lately centered on a character he calls the “designated old guy.” Long since on the wagon and an obviously thoughtful man, Nolte seems to share the reader’s surprise that he lived long enough to take that role.
Better than the usual run of actor memoirs and plenty of fun to boot.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-221957-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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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