Not John O’Hara, but not Judith Krantz either: girl talk somewhere in between, suitable for YA readers aged 14 to 84 and...
Novelist/memoirist Johnson (Perfect Together, 1991, etc.) revisits Century City, Culver City, and New York City in the days when bicoastal travel meant riding The Chief or The Twentieth Century and the movies starred quick-witted women and well-groomed men speaking clever dialogue.
A lot of that dialogue was scripted by Nunnally Johnson, a dominant Hollywood writer/producer as well as the author’s father. So what would it be like, you ask, coming of age in Hollywood’s Golden Age? In glorious black and white, Johnson recalls little Shirley Temple and Roddy McDowell, the pools, the croquet games, the gossip of The Business in the summers with Pop. Winters in New York with Mom involved the Gorgon School with Tony Perkins, Old Golds, cocktail shakers, Peck & Peck, and “coming out”—in a more innocent time when that had nothing to do with your sexual orientation and everything to do with debutante balls. East or West, once the war was over, Johnson endured teenage parties and the rigors of dating. She sailed to Europe on the Queen Mary and flew home into Idlewild. Johnson’s flashback includes friends like frosty Gregory, anorexic Julie, and Don Sweetheart (yes, that’s his real name). The cast includes Betty and Bogey, Smith classmate Sylvia Plath, and colorful stepparents. Her memory piece’s best-drawn portraits are Hollywood Pop, he of three wives and four children, and New York Mom. It’s all terribly dramatic, but why not? Nunnally advised his daughter to think of herself “not as Schrafft’s but as ‘21’,”and so she does. She trots out the grand old motifs of teenage angst, money, and sex—the latter problem temporarily solved when she finally does it. The book ends with Nora’s marriage and the prospect of settlement in an Aramco post in the Arabian desert. It seems more installments are due.
Not John O’Hara, but not Judith Krantz either: girl talk somewhere in between, suitable for YA readers aged 14 to 84 and good company on the red-eye or the beach.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-3447-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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