A life as if seen from afar. (16 pp. b&w photos)
A memoir gets mired in heavy detail and an endless procession of admittedly justifiable mood swings.
The mood swings and the lamentable lack of focus can both be blamed on the huge presence of Peter O'Toole, to whom British actress Phillips was married for many years. Too many pages are occupied by his over-the-top lifestyle, while his long-suffering wife tends to disappear into the background setting. It’s not terribly shocking to learn that O'Toole was a “dangerous, disruptive human being” whose “only slight difficulty was drink”—well, maybe there were those other little problems like being a megalomaniacal control freak and a truly frightening driver, as well as having a tendency to simply take off and go missing. Nor will anyone be surprised that life with Peter was “intermittently ecstatic or unbelievably dreadful.” Phillips sure was a sucker for the ecstasy and perhaps even sought out those swings, for she also writes of her acting career that “the highs were glorious and the lows difficult to look back on without shuddering.” Among the highs she ably captures is the opening of O'Toole's Merchant of Venice, “a night to cherish for a lifetime. At the wild curtain calls I sat in my unbecoming dress, tears rolling down my face.” The lows rarely have any twist of the knife, but when Phillips is candid, she conveys a gripping sense of her emotions. (During a thoroughly unexpected affair, she admits, “Behaving badly was making me happy.”) Her own career is downplayed, though fully covered. Some of the incidentals are captivating, as when she describes Judi Dench's intelligence as an actor, but too often her rambling text offers only a laundry list of names without any meat attached: “Penelope Wilson was a wonderful colleague,” and that's enough about her.
A life as if seen from afar. (16 pp. b&w photos)Pub Date: May 21, 2003
ISBN: 0-571-21128-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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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