People who love star autobiographies will no doubt find this satisfying, though younger readers, who’ve never heard of Mod...
Predictable memory-tripping by the erstwhile star of Mod Squad.
Lipton, famous for her role as Julie Barnes in Mod Squad, describes a childhood filled with secrets: no one talked about her grandfather’s mistress, a black maid; or the baby who died when a nurse dropped him; or the possible suicide of an uncle; or the abuse Lipton sustained at the hands of her aunt’s husband. But Lipton rose above all these tangles to become a model and actress, starting out with small bit parts, then becoming a household name in Mod Squad. She recounts a heart-wrenching affair with Paul McCartney and a fling with Elvis Presley. Finally, she meets the love of her life, Grammy-winner Quincy Jones. Withstanding criticism from a public uncomfortable with an interracial union, Jones and Lipton married in 1974. They had two children, and Lipton threw herself into motherhood, giving up acting completely. Then, in the mid 1980s, the marriage fell apart. Lipton’s description of the end seems coyly incomplete: the divorce seems to come out of the blue, and Lipton explains only that she “needed spiritual guidance from within” and that “though the karmic cord wouldn’t be cut for years,” the “fourteen-year cycle” of marriage and child-rearing with Jones was over. After leaving him, Lipton returned to acting. Her descriptions of the post-marriage, post-Mod Squad phase of her career are the strongest sections here. The chapter on Twin Peaks, the David Lynch television show with Lipton playing Norma Jennings, is fascinating and passionate. It reads with an immediacy and vigor that much of the rest lacks. Indeed, Lipton leans too often on tired, unimaginative prose (Her “daughters. . . will always be there” for her, “Losing a sibling is devastating”).
People who love star autobiographies will no doubt find this satisfying, though younger readers, who’ve never heard of Mod Squad, are unlikely to pick it up.Pub Date: May 9, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-32413-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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