Gracefully written, keenly observed, Fruchter’s portrait limns the joys of friendship and of lives devoted to art.
Musician and journalist Fruchter recalls 15 warm, happy years with actor/musician Dudley Moore.
How refreshing that “Intimate” in the subtitle of this show-business memoir refers not to sensational revelations, but to personal, often tender recollections the author shares about her subject. Fruchter does relate that Moore seduced women, suffered four troubled marriages and was uncircumcised—the latter, however, noted only because he and Fructer considered producing a documentary about circumcision. Otherwise, Fruchter offers a charming, endearing account of Moore’s work as an actor and musician. A former music critic for the New York Times and an accomplished pianist, Fruchter first spoke to Moore by phone for an article she was writing in 1987. Drawn together by their love of music, they eventually met for lunch, the first of a series of witty, sometimes loopy conversations they shared—many of which Fruchter reconstructs here in delightful detail. Soon, Fruchter and Moore toured the world in a series of classical concerts. Along the way, turbulence from Moore’s fourth marriage unnerved the actor, making his Platonic relationship with Fruchter, married and the mother of four, a tranquil refuge. Late in the ’90s, Fruchter observed Moore falter as pianist (“My fingers feel like sausages,” he complained). His speech began to slur and he often lost his balance, misleading many to think he was just like Arthur, the alcoholic title character of his most successful film. Ultimately, Moore was diagnosed with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, an incurable, degenerative neurological condition. Fruchter and her family drew close to Moore, as does the reader, following their visits to a cabin in Nova Scotia, Moore’s farewell journey to England and his heartbreaking demise in 2002.
Gracefully written, keenly observed, Fruchter’s portrait limns the joys of friendship and of lives devoted to art.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-09-190080-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ebury Press/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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