An affecting narrative of two top-notch English actors, of interest to specialized American readers who find the milieu...
Devoted personal remembrance of the author’s tumultuous 28-year marriage to the brilliant, troubled British actor who died, at age 60, in 2002.
A well-know actress in her own right, Hancock was born on the Isle of Wight in 1933, nine years before the man who would become her second husband in 1974. Thaw came from working-class Manchester and never quite recovered from the early desertion of his mother. He and Hancock both trained at the prestigious, competitive Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and enjoyed illustrious separate careers. Thaw kicked off with the Royal Shakespeare Company and understudied Lawrence Olivier in 1962; he was best known in England as star of the long-running TV series Inspector Morse. The statuesque Hancock, who describes her career as “a fearful hotch-potch of the serious and trivial,” gained her best part as Madame Ranevskaya in the National Theatre production of The Cherry Orchard and was the RSC’s first female artistic director. Her memoir offers a lively testament to the changing times, from the swinging ’60s (when she wore a full-length red-fox coat and popped uppers and downers), through the violent ’70s (she grew politically active and befriended Germaine Greer), to the grim Thatcher years (obsessed with “ratings and budgets”). She first met Thaw in the mid-’60s, when he played opposite her in So What About Love? He was a hard drinker and a workaholic, often dogged by depression; Hancock frankly acknowledges that she thrived on the volatility of being with a drinker. Separated at one point, the two happily reconciled, until cancer weakened and destroyed him. The narrative is peppered with entries from Hancock’s diary of Thaw’s last days, and a concluding chapter recounts her attempt to find his lost mother. Though it vividly depicts numerous famous friends, such as Peter O’Toole, the essence is its loving, sentimental portrait of a close marital bond.
An affecting narrative of two top-notch English actors, of interest to specialized American readers who find the milieu compelling.Pub Date: March 2, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-417-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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