A lively look at a colorful career and an unlikely friendship.
Veteran Hollywood stuntman, dialogue coach, actor, producer and director Hinkle wryly recounts his adventures in Movieland, most notably a close friendship with James Dean.
After a spell toiling on the peripheries of the film industry, in 1955 the proud Texan and rodeo cowboy was approached by director George Stevens, who was interested in procuring Hinkle’s services for his upcoming adaptation of Edna Ferber’s Giant. Hinkle, an aspiring actor, reckoned he’d be perfect for the role of young West Texan hotshot Jett Rink, but Stevens had other ideas: He asked Hinkle to help star Rock Hudson talk like a genuine Texan cowboy. The author took the job and became fast friends with the actor cast to play Rink, a young up-and-comer who called himself Jimmy Dean. Hinkle’s anecdotes of life with Dean on the set are warm and amusing, offering an irresistibly prosaic glimpse of the elusive legend, with whom Hinkle hunted rabbits, raced cars and engaged in other hijinks. Hinkle enjoyed a sort of older-brother relationship with the star, teaching Dean to spin a rope and dress in authentic cowboy style, and welcomed the lonely actor into his family. His account of Dean’s tragic early death is freshly affecting, despite the story’s mythic familiarity. Hinkle is a garrulous storyteller—though he occasionally lays on the Texas Pride schtick a little thickly—and his memories of Elizabeth Taylor’s passionate personality and salty language, Hudson’s moody insecurity and Dean’s fierce competitiveness are good fun. After Giant, Hinkle’s career spun out in a number of improbable directions, including stunt flying, forming his own successful production company and managing motorcycle madman Evel Knievel. All of this is diverting, but the heart of the book is Hinkle’s friendship with Dean, who comes across as an uncommonly sensitive and kind young man. The anecdotes about the eventful making of Giant are Hollywood insider gold.
A lively look at a colorful career and an unlikely friendship.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4093-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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