An epic biography of one of America's most popular and iconographic movie stars. John Wayne, who used to boast, ``I don't act, I react,'' brought a relentless and sometimes compelling trademark sameness to almost every role in the 200 movies he starred in. The irony, as historians Roberts (Purdue Univ.) and Olson (Sam Houston State Univ.) note, is that ``he had never served a day in the military and he was America's ideal marine; he disliked horses and he was the country's favorite cowboy.'' The authors try to make the case that it was precisely because of such contradictions that Wayne was (and is) America personified. They are more convincing when they stick to the detail and circumstance of Wayne's lifewhich they do relentlessly. In fact, this is not so much a tell-all as a tell- everything biography. Still, there are fascinating digressions on the economics of B movies, Hollywood in the McCarthy era, John Huston (who rescued Wayne's free-falling career in the '30s), and so on and on. The authors are admirably restrained in psychoanalyzing Wayne, but their insights into his character are invariably shrewd and subtle. They convincingly connect, for example, his guilt over avoiding military service during WW II to his later, rabid anticommunism. They also detail at length how his personality was ultimately shaped, even absorbed, by his roles. Over the years, John Wayne the man and the actor both endured an almost ceaseless barrage of criticism, but as Roberts and Olson (who coauthored When the Domino Fell: America in Vietnam, 19451990, 1991) demonstrate, he had an undeniable ``something,'' a force, a charisma, a basic decency that still radiates in his films. Despite its occasional clunkiness, this is very likely to be the definitive Wayne biography for years to come. (38 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-923837-4
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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