Fast-paced, funny and occasionally horrifying portrait of a compulsive personality and the culture of excess that both...
Variety senior editor Hofler (The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson, 2005, etc.) presents the gaudy career of flamboyant Hollywood and Broadway producer Allan Carr (1937–1999), a strong contender for the most tasteless tyro in show business.
Caftan-clad, morbidly obese and publicly gay in an era when, even in the entertainment industry, flaunting one’s homosexuality was still very much taboo, Carr cut a curious figure among the beautiful people of Hollywood. He cultivated an outrageous public persona and marshaled his gifts for promotion to create a series of extravagantly themed parties that brought together old-school Hollywood royalty, rock musicians and the gay demimonde in sybaritic soirees with names like “The Mick Jagger Cycle Sluts Party.” The parties were hits, but as a producer, Carr’s record was rather mixed. His sensibilities synched up perfectly with the stage musical Grease, and he shepherded the massively successful film adaptation in 1978. Lightning struck again with his Broadway musical adaptation of the French farce La Cage aux Folles (1983), a long-running hit that also broke boundaries in bringing its gay subject matter to a mainstream theater audience. But Carr’s debit column is a doozy, containing the legendarily tacky and inept Village People vehicle Can’t Stop the Music (1980) and gauche cinematic non-events Grease 2 (1982) and Where the Boys are ’84. Most damning, though, was the 1989 Academy Awards broadcast, a fiasco of epic proportions that reached its nadir with a tone-deaf Rob Lowe warbling “Proud Mary” to Snow White. The Oscars telecast effectively ended Carr’s career, and the ailing producer retreated to his pleasure palace of a house and succumbed to his chronic health problems, ultimately dying of liver cancer. Does this tawdry legacy warrant a book? That’s debatable, but Hofler delivers a hell of a tour of Hollywood egotism, crassness and gross excess. Carr would have approved.
Fast-paced, funny and occasionally horrifying portrait of a compulsive personality and the culture of excess that both created and destroyed him.Pub Date: March 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-306-81655-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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