Informative, although often overwhelming in scope. (16-page b&w photo insert, not seen)
An account of Havana’s internationally renowned nightclub during its 1950s heyday.
Art conservator Lowinger was just a toddler when her parents fled Cuba in the early ’60s. Throughout her childhood, she was haunted by their stories of starry evenings spent in Tropicana’s outdoor cabaret. So when the Los Angeles resident visited Cuba as an adult, saw the glamour of Tropicana for herself, and learned that the performer once known as the “First Lady of Tropicana” now lived in L.A., Lowinger lost no time in visiting the octogenarian Fox. Thus began several years of conversations that comprise the bulk of this text, along with scenes set at the homes of former Tropicana players in New York, Miami, Las Vegas and Cuba. Despite the shared author credit, the story is told in the first person, from Lowinger’s point of view. The best sections portray such quirky nightclub characters as the leprous choreographer whose otherworldly shows sent audience members into trances, a teenaged Czech acrobat who danced cabaret, and former Tropicana owner (and the co-author’s deceased husband) Martín Fox, a gambler and close friend to mafiosi who never left the house without his .38-calibre Smith & Wesson. Too often, though, Lowinger falls into show-biz groupie mentality, boring readers with society-page–style summaries of so-and-so’s mink stole, pearl necklace or terracotta nail polish. The wearer of many of these accoutrements is Fox, a pro-Bush Republican with whom the progressive Lowinger frequently finds herself fighting about politics—also a major preoccupation in corrupt pre-Revolutionary Cuba. The development of the authors’ contentious friendship shares the stage with the Tropicana’s history; Fox’s relationship with housemate Rosa Sanchez provides a third narrative strand that leads to a sweetly romantic ending.
Informative, although often overwhelming in scope. (16-page b&w photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-101224-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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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