Engrossing profile of unrelenting excess.
Diligently reconstructed life story of a man who readily laughed off lables like “bounder” and “cad” while elevating that of “Latin lover” to both art form and profession.
Porfirio Rubirosa was born in 1909 to a militarist adventurer who instilled in him the code of tiguerismo (ultimate Dominican machismo). His fate was sealed by his being sent, a failed high-school student, to France for academic rehabilitation—and then some. Levy, film critic for the Portland Oregonian and chronicler of mega-celebrities (Rat Pack Confidential, 1998), tracks “Rubi” through the nighteries and brothels of Paris, then back to his impoverished home island, where he dared dance, sans permission, with the daughter of the Dominican Republic’s emergent dictator, Rafael Trujillo, as a young lieutenant (albeit with connections) at a military ball. Even El Benefactor (one of the Caribbean’s cruelest despots) knew the girl was enthralled by the cosmopolitan bon vivant and shortly blessed their marriage. It wouldn’t last; neither would those with French actress Danielle Darrieux or American multimillionaire heiresses Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton, but it set Rubi up as a vague Dominican diplomatic fixture for decades. “I can’t work,” he once told a reporter, “because I don’t have time for it.” Meanwhile, women came, in the off-hours of his various marriages, and fell, including Christina Onassis, Eva Perón and Zsa Zsa Gabor. According to Levy, Rubirosa’s basic attitude was reflected in a comment on his father’s tendency to have illegitimate children: “My mother got fat,” he explained. During World War II, he sold Dominican visas to European Jews for up to $5,000 each, but professed to be far more interested in spending money than making it. When he fatally crashed his Ferrari in 1965 after a night of revelry, the money was almost gone. A fitting end, most said, including his then wife, French actress Odile Rodin, half his age.
Engrossing profile of unrelenting excess.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-00-717059-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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