A cross between a family memoir written in the sunset of life and a faded Hollywood Babylon: a search for the mother of Cecil B. DeMille’s youngest son. Following a quick survey of generations of de Milles and of Richard’s youth and young adulthood, the mother mystery begins with a 1955 revelation. Until then, the 33-year-old Richard knew no parents but his adoptive ones, Hollywood royalty Cecil B. and Constance DeMille. Upon the death of his uncle, director and playwright William de Mille, Richard learned that William was in reality his father and that his mother was long-deceased scenarist Lorna Moon. Richard’s decades-long investigation into his past revealed Moon to be a Scottish-born woman, originally named Helen Nora Wilson Low, who became a bestselling author. He also uncovered the elaborate maneuver that made him an orphan and William’s brother Cecil his adoptive father, and how Lorna left two other children (Richard’s half-brother and half-sister) behind to seek fame in Hollywood. Despite the wealth of rare detail (e.g., Cecil’s dalliances and physical attributes; young Agnes de Mille’s demeanor), the book leaves no aftertaste of titillation. Instead there is gravity, particularly in the author’s final reflections on his sparkling, driven mother and the plain declaration of his purpose for the book: “to tell a true story about some people who are gone . . . whose lines crossed one afternoon to produce their chronicler.” De Mille, whose long career has included science fiction writing and television directing, also reveals a mature understanding, concluding that his life was probably better as it was than as it might have been. But the book’s sobriety has limits. Those interested mainly in Hollywood tales or the de Milles may find Low-family-related chapters overreported. Further, the author’s emotional balance, seemingly natural to his age and disposition, lacks passion.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-21757-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
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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