A lucid, unexpectedly uplifting, and affecting celebration of love that finds hope in despair.
A husband’s love for his wife intensifies after she is diagnosed with breast cancer in this memoir.
In 2000, Simon and his wife, Susan, were in their 34th year of marriage, a moment the author describes as “a perfect time of our lives.” That winter, their lives changed indelibly when Susan was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer. Simon, having already experienced the death of his mother-in-law at the age of 56 from the same illness, girded himself for the worst. Whereas Susan, then 54, maintained a positive mental attitude, the author fell into depression and at times was afraid he was losing his mind. The memoir charts Susan’s journey, including her mastectomy and aggressive chemotherapy. But the focus is on Simon’s own struggles, describing out-of-body experiences in which he felt he had visited an imaginary ballroom. When his therapist suggested that these experiences brought dignity to a terrible moment, the author recognized his virtual ballroom as a sanctuary. This breakthrough inspired Simon to write and produce a play about his experience of his wife’s illness. The author describes with emotional clarity how uncomfortable procedures, such as administering an injection to Susan, surprisingly became acts of love: “I discover that I can do things I never thought possible and which creates a deep intimacy. Feeling, touching, and noticing are now different from before.” Simon adopts the same candid precision in describing his visions and his bid to understand them: “As I wander around this brilliant ballroom, I am filled with awe. The ballroom sits empty, hollow, pregnant with purpose and readiness. I am the only one here.” Some readers may feel that the author is unnecessarily wordy on occasion: “Wrongness extends beyond the here and now into the eternal, the stuff of primordial creation.” This can be overlooked given Simon’s dazzling eloquence when communicating his deepest fear of losing Susan: “This fear is not just about living alone; the fear is about being alone. The anticipation of losing part of myself will create an existential aloneness in the universe.” Happily, this moving book suggests that people’s fears are not always manifested in reality in quite the way they anticipated.
A lucid, unexpectedly uplifting, and affecting celebration of love that finds hope in despair.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73790-972-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Actual Dance LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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