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
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
