One of those rare oral biographies that’s admiring yet still honest.
A star-studded cast comes together with relative unknowns to chat about their buddy Sean.
Shying away from the standard hagiographic strategy—dark, troubled thespian is constantly misunderstood by the dull masses and those Hollywood suits—British journalist/documentary filmmaker Kelly relies instead on a galaxy of interviewees ranging from actors Christopher Walken, Angelica Huston, and Jack Nicholson to Penn’s mother and a gaggle of his less famous friends. Son of a devoutly Catholic Irish-Italian actress and a Russian-Jewish journeyman director, Penn grew up pretty wild in Malibu, surfing, drinking, getting into trouble, and screwing around making short movies with friends like Emilio Estevez. After some hardscrabble theater work in Los Angeles and later New York, he got a major role in the 1981 film Taps. Fast Times at Ridgemont High followed soon after. His career since has hardly been a smooth upward climb: downs include the sad, crass failure of Shanghai Surprise, and his increasingly impressive work as a writer/director (The Pledge, The Crossing Guard) has not yet achieved much commercial success. Given the wealth of voices here, it’s easy for Kelly to resist the authorial urge to pontificate about the meaning to Penn’s life; instead, he lets its enjoyably random chaos wash across the page. One person after another attests to Penn’s mule-headed nature and his monkish devotion to the craft of acting, which includes such irritating-to-coworkers quirks as insisting on being referred to by his character’s name and acting rude off-camera to people he was supposed to hate on-camera. Great stories include the anecdote about Penn and some friends getting a private serenade from Jewel—until she was interrupted by a bang: the actor had just shot a rat with a laser-sighted Glock.
One of those rare oral biographies that’s admiring yet still honest.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2005
ISBN: 1-84195-623-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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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