The movie actor with the face of a wooden Viking—and the acting ability generally associated with that substance—has dropped the wheel of his famous schooner long enough to produce an autobiography. When amateur actor turns novice author reason dictates that the same motive force is at work in both jobs— the need for money. Indeed, Hayden is honest about it. Hayden is honest about everything. It is the honesty of the man that saves the book. Technically, the book as autobiography has so much wrong with it in its parts that it offers a reviewer's field day: i.e., interrupted flashbacks; the use of "I", "he", "you" to describe himself; a total self-concentration. However, taken as a whole, it is the interesting story of an interesting man. His description of growing up in the '30's and a boyhood under the wing of a con-man stepfather brings a time and a person to wretched life. His indictment of Hollywood comes as no surprise but is revealing of the Hollywood attitude toward their art—pulchritude is enough. Two years ago, Hayden's flight with his custody torn children made national headlines and won him the acclaim that his acting never did. That incident exposed him as the book does—a determined individualist and a romantic—the 19th century hero chained in 20th century red tape. With the total unselective recall of a man who has had psychiatrists, Hayden has produced a surprising book that will be read.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1963
ISBN: 1574090488
Page Count: 454
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1963
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
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