Gossip mavens will be disappointed, since Dukakis names names when she praises but usually doesn’t when she disses (no,...
An often intense personal memoir recounts the dedicated stage actress’s journey to an Oscar, as well as memorable bumps in the road.
Dukakis got her statuette for Best Supporting Actress, after almost three decades onstage, for the film Moonstruck in 1988. Her disjointed narrative opens in that time of triumph, coincident with the unsuccessful presidential campaign of her cousin, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. The author takes a beat or two to celebrate her Greek-American heritage and her immigrant family’s travails in overcoming humble beginnings and long odds in Lowell, Massachusetts. After acknowledging that there was already a large Greek community in place, for example, Dukakis recalls “Irish dominance” as the reason given and accepted for her father’s failure to pass the bar exam. The celebration turns dark as she delves relentlessly into an ethnic childhood with neurosis fertilized by her parents’ obsession with the potential for being “dishonored” by a daughter—based, Dukakis suggests, on an incident back in their home village that had fatal consequences. Terrified as a child by her mother’s constant threats of physical violence, she gradually apprehended the stress of accepting a traditional second-class woman’s role to preserve family unity. After recounting numerous personal shortfalls, false starts, unrequited love, descent into drugs, drink, and depression (including suicidal fumblings), Dukakis pronounces that “acting saved my life,” and readers who have hung in to this point should certainly be ready to believe her. Marriage to actor Louis Zorich, their joint passion for theater in Greenwich Village during the 1950s, then a 19-year association with the Whole Theater Group of Montclair, New Jersey, firmly fixed her dedication. The narrative takes a notable side trip into goddess-based eastern mysticism, resulting in an auditory epiphany: no hallucination, claims she.
Gossip mavens will be disappointed, since Dukakis names names when she praises but usually doesn’t when she disses (no, Moonstruck star Cher never comes up).Pub Date: July 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-018821-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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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