Dignified, useful history, especially of Vladivostok’s evolution from shantytown to modern port.
Four generations of Yul Brynner’s enterprising family thrive and prosper from Switzerland to Vladivostok to Hollywood.
The author is the star’s son by B-movie actress Virginia Gilmore. Rock Brynner moved from chess prodigy and child mascot of his father’s rat-packing to hippie rock-’n’-roller, alcoholic and thriller author (The Doomsday Report, 1998, etc.) before embarking on deeply reflective research into his family’s roots in Vladivostok. There he unearthed the fascinating story of patriarch Jules Bryner, born near Geneva in 1849, who struck out to make a maritime fortune in the trading houses of Shanghai and Yokohama, then moved to the Russian frontier port of Vladivostok to seek opportunity in developing a town that would become “Ruler of the East.” An important naval outpost, Vladivostok grew with the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and soon Bryner & Co. became a hugely successful enterprise. Jules, now a rich, established philanthropist, didn’t let the fact that he had a wife and family in Japan stop him from marrying a Russian girl and fathering numerous children. The narrative follows the perilous navigations of his second son, Boris, through the shoals of Revolution and Soviet perfidy. Branded bourgeois by the Bolsheviks, family members were imprisoned or forced to flee abroad. Boris married an opera singer; their son Yul (with an n added to the family surname) made his way as a Gypsy guitarist and trapeze artist in Europe, forging important contacts in Paris with Jean Cocteau and Mikhail Chekhov. He found defining roles on Broadway, from Lute Song with costar Mary Martin to The King and I, which brought him movie stardom as well. Contrary to the advice of his agent, he shaved off his already thinning hair to achieve the bald crown that made him famous. His son does a proficient job of soberly presenting the family saga, including, but not fawning over, its Hollywood episodes.
Dignified, useful history, especially of Vladivostok’s evolution from shantytown to modern port.Pub Date: April 4, 2006
ISBN: 1-58642-102-6
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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
PERSPECTIVES
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