Amid the current flood of dysfunctional-family memoirs, this one by biographer Bosworth (Diane Arbus, 1984, etc.) stands out for its lack of self-pity and its magnetic central figure, her father, Bartley Crum—a habituÇ in the realms of celebrity and power who was finally destroyed by personal weakness and devotion to principle. With their talent, elegance, and glamour, Bart and wife, Anna Gertrude Bosworth (known as ``Cutsie''), a former San Francisco reporter and novelist, must have resembled Dick and Nicole Diver to their friends. Approaching life with ``supreme self-confidence and an attitude of entitlement,'' Bart used his connections as a prominent San Francisco lawyer to gain entrÇe to Hollywood and Washington. Patricia and her brother, Bart Jr., grew up near the glow of celebrity, with visitors such as Montgomery Clift, Rita Hayworth (whom Bart represented in her divorce from Aly Kahn), and Wendell Willkie (whom Bart advised in the 1940 presidential campaign). Yet their father continually passed in and out on either business trips or one of his perpetual political crusades; a dismayed Cutsie retreated into sullenness and affairs. Then, when Bart denounced the House Un-American Activities Committee as an attorney for two members of the blacklisted ``Hollywood Ten,'' he was trailed by the FBI. Family troubles followed: insolvency, Bart's worsening addiction to alcohol and pills, Patricia's marital difficulties, Bart Jr.'s troubled youth and suicide, and, in 1959, after a disastrous appearance before the Senate Rackets Committee investigating Jimmy Hoffa, Bart Sr.'s own appointment in Samarra. In the aftermath, using her mother's diaries, interviews with colleagues, and her father's FBI dossier, Bosworth had to square her ``fantasy image of Daddy as Superman'' with the reality of a decent man forced to inform secretly to the FBI. An unflinchingly honest depiction of a family undone by the whirlwind revolving around an ebullient, compassionate man who was also a weak husband and father.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-80809-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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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