Martin’s star quality prevails.
Affectionate but not airbrushed portrait of the Broadway diva who got her first big break with a naughty Cole Porter song but flew into legend in a children’s classic.
Davis (Van Johnson: MGM’s Golden Boy, 2001, etc.) draws upon a full shelf of oral histories he collected from various theater artists to tell the story of Mary Martin (1913–90). A stage-struck Texas girl who didn’t let a teenage marriage (or the resulting son, Larry Hagman) stand in her way, she was undeterred even by a humiliating 1935 rejection from theater impresario Billy Rose. In a moment worthy of Busby Berkeley, Martin told her mother, “I’m going back to California and I’m going to have a career.” She copped leads in several tepid movie musicals, but the camera did not love her. She turned to Broadway, which loved her from the moment she did a striptease while singing “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” in 1938. Her signature roles, in South Pacific, Peter Pan and The Sound of Music, were more demure, but she established an intense rapport with the audience in whatever she did. Clearly a Martin fan—indeed, he spent some time with her on the ranch in Brazil to which she more or less retired in the ’70s—Davis summons scores of anecdotes and testimonials demonstrating that she could be warm, generous and supremely professional. He also acknowledges that she could be controlling and temperamental, most notably during tryouts for the flop musical Jennie in 1963. Micromanaging every aspect of her career, second husband Richard Halliday irritated and frequently outraged nearly everyone in Martin’s life, including her semi-estranged son Hagman. In addition, Davis reports, Halliday was a mean-tempered drug and alcohol abuser and a closet homosexual. As for Martin’s alleged romances with Jean Arthur and Janet Gaynor, the author declares that the exact nature of those relationships is “unknown.”
Martin’s star quality prevails.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8061-3905-0
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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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