An intriguing, honest look at the hidden side of Hollywood.
In this debut memoir, entertainment journalist Merrill recalls her decadeslong career as an interviewer of Hollywood’s brightest stars.
When Merrill was growing up in 1950s Baltimore, she thought that her only strength was her pretty face and that her only option was to marry well. After she ended up a divorced mother of two by the age of 25, she decided to take her life in her own hands and turned her camera-ready face and love of talking into a career—first as an Emmy Award–winning local talk show host and later, as an entertainment journalist. Merrill interviewed numerous celebrities for short video profiles that were then distributed to television stations around the country to publicize movies. She shares anecdotes about her intimate conversations with such luminaries as Paul Newman, Jimmy Stewart, Tom Hanks and Cher. Her career eventually took her to film sets around the world, including a bleak Russian hotel where she had to barter Marlboros and Tootsie Rolls to get the electrical wiring fixed. However, Merrill’s story isn’t all name-dropping and globe-trotting. The author’s honesty is impressive, as she delves into her desperate search for a husband after her divorce, her sugar addiction that drastically affected her appearance and behavior, and her stubborn belief that she was always right. She tells it all with a drive that will leave readers with little doubt about how she became successful. However, although her voice makes her an engaging storyteller, it doesn’t always make her likable; some remarks about women in Hollywood, however truthful they may be, come off as rather sexist (“they could get away with their bitchiness as long as some powerful man protected them”), and her frequent use of “fat” as an insult may offend some readers. Nonetheless, Merrill’s willingness to admit her mistakes is refreshing, and her tales from the film-publicity trenches are consistently engaging.
An intriguing, honest look at the hidden side of Hollywood.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490314808
Page Count: 180
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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