Like a couple of hours with Columbo, minus the genius—inessential, but still pretty good company.
Life and times of the man in the dirty raincoat.
Actor Falk’s distinctive persona is so familiar that it’s impossible to read any of this whimsical autobiography’s many bite-size chapters without hearing the man’s raspy mumble; that’s the principal source of charm here, perfectly complementing the digressive (read “unfocused”), no-big-deal account of the various jobs and colleagues that have marked Falk’s haphazard path. His career, which includes the iconic television role of Columbo (the deceptively brilliant detective—Sherlock Holmes in dumb-schlemiel drag) and stints with John Cassavetes and Neil Simon, is impressive, but Falk describes the work in a manner so unpretentious and offhand that he undercuts the justification for writing an autobiography in the first place. One wishes for a more in-depth account of, say, the making of Cassavetes’s seminal Husbands, but Falk is content to call the auteur a genius and leave it at that. He is reliably witty on his early career as a diffident government bureaucrat, and his indomitable independent streak is good for a number of anecdotes involving arrests in foreign lands. The Columbo sections are amusing, as Falk describes developing the detective’s mannerisms and appearance—the actor reveals much of his technique in these passages, and it is surprisingly beholden to the “outside-in” approach associated with classically trained actors, rather than the Method style suggested by the tortured improvisations that characterize Cassavetes’s work. But these insights are largely incidental. Falk admits at the outset that he fears his story will bore the reader, and his strategy is to set it down in easily digestible chunks with weirdly funny titles, such as “The Raisin Story” and “On the Role Overcoats Play in an Actor’s Career.” This approach indeed makes for a painless read, but underscores the general impression of inconsequence.
Like a couple of hours with Columbo, minus the genius—inessential, but still pretty good company.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7867-1795-5
Page Count: 280
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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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