A savory treatment of a beloved yet troubled theater legend.
A judicious yet candid biography of Hart (1904–61), the Broadway Prospero who transformed out-of-town dross into opening-night gold—and his own torments into opportunities for success.
Escaping a miserable, poverty-stricken upbringing, Hart achieved celebrity in 1930 with Once in a Lifetime, a Hollywood satire that he co-wrote with George S. Kaufman. He went on to collaborate on seven more shows with Kaufman (including You Can’t Take It With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner), then wrote his own comedies (Light Up the Sky), musicals (Jubilee with Cole Porter, Lady in the Dark with Ira Gershwin and Kurt Weill), and screenplays (Gentleman’s Agreement and A Star Is Born), while also directing (My Fair Lady and Camelot). Bach (Marlene Dietrich, 1992, etc.) relates with aplomb the backstage dramas behind these productions, and is especially good at relating how Hart handled such titanic egos as Alexander Woollcott, Gertrude Lawrence, Rex Harrison, George M. Cohan, and Lerner and Loewe with intelligence, moxie, and charm. But he also explores (with the help of numerous oral histories and interviews with Hart’s associates) the shadows on the other side of Hart’s sunny surface. Hart coped with his manic depression through work, shopping sprees, countless psychiatric sessions, and even shock treatment. With sensitivity, Bach also discusses Hart’s ambivalence about his sexual orientation—fears that did not subside until into his 40s, when he married Kitty Carlisle. In the face of all this, Hart emerges triumphant in Bach’s telling, living “a life of uncommon generosity in an often mean-spirited world, a life more painful than we knew, and maybe a little braver, too.”
A savory treatment of a beloved yet troubled theater legend.Pub Date: April 29, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-44154-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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