Put your mitts together for this ``sock'' biography of one of the last of the great entertainers. Few entertainers have inspired such irrational excesses of bile and adoration as actor, director, occasional songster, and Muscular Dystrophy Association pitchman Jerry Lewis. On one hand, he is reviled as a crude, mean-spirited, one-trick putz. Yet in Europe he is feted as a misunderstood comic genius; the French even went so far as to make him a commander of their Legion of Honor. Levy, a film critic for The Oregonian, convincingly demonstrates that both sides are right. Like a dark variety show, Jerry certainly offers something for everyone to hate. He has lived a breathtaking Hollywood excess (traveling everywhere with 75 pieces of luggage, never wearing the same socks twice), and some of his 50-plus films are embarrassingly bad—mawkish, sentimental, often wildly unfunny. But he also has created a number of comic masterpieces, most notably The Nutty Professor and The Patsy. Even his worst films have their moments of redeeming comic brilliance. No wonder then that Jerry has influenced the very shape of modern comedy. Comedians from Robin Williams to Woody Allen to that vile epigone Jim Carrey have drawn inspiration from the free-form id- driven comic style Lewis created. He began his career in the dying days of vaudeville, playing in small venues to little notice until a chance double-bill with the almost equally unsuccessful Dean Martin. By his late 20s, despite a nasty split with Martin, Lewis was the most popular, best-paid entertainer in America. Twenty years later, he was a ridiculed has-been. Marred only by a lack of a bibliography and footnotes, this scrupulous, skillful, incessantly fair account should go a long way toward restoring Lewis to his proper place in the entertainment firmament. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-13248-4
Page Count: 528
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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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