An extremely entertaining chronicle of one of the most distinctive and absurdly gifted personalities in the history of show...
Funny-faced girl makes good: the extraordinary career of Kay Thompson (1909–1998).
Hollywood director and producer Irvin presents the life of Thompson with vigor and dash befitting his larger-than-life subject. She was a singer, songwriter, arranger, vocal coach and author, best remembered today for her Eloise children’s-book series, an iconic performance in Funny Face (1957) and as the godmother and muse of Liza Minnelli. Born Catherine Fink in modest circumstances in St. Louis, Mo., the precociously talented Thompson wasted little time shedding her Midwestern roots and taking her rightful place in the world of show business, forging a successful career singing on the radio before winding up at M-G-M as the studio’s in-house vocal arranger and coach. From the start, Thompson was too intelligent, too iconoclastic, too demanding…too much, and her wildly innovative artistry and eccentric hauteur prevented her from ever truly breaking through to a mass audience. However, those traits endeared her to Hollywood royalty and made acolytes of the likes of Judy Garland, Lena Horne, and Frank Sinatra, all of whom were coached by Thompson. Irvin charts Thompson’s dizzying successes (a nightclub act with the Williams Brothers that broke attendance records and convulsed audiences to the point of hysteria) and crushing failures (a control freak and egomaniac, Thompson repeatedly shot herself in the foot, turning down offers or leaving projects that failed to meet her impossible standards) with rollicking humor and infectious enthusiasm. The story of Thompson’s Eloise franchise—the author had honed the character since childhood, and frequently startled peers by lapsing into the moppet’s inimitable patois—is as fascinating as her performing career, and equally frustrating, as her abominable treatment of her collaborator, illustrator Hilary Knight (Thompson’s need for sole credit bordered on the pathological), casts a bit of a pall over those effervescent little tomes.
An extremely entertaining chronicle of one of the most distinctive and absurdly gifted personalities in the history of show business.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7653-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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