Why the disparities in the diva’s work? Santopietro never really gets to deeper reasons (if anyone can), but his individual...
A fairly objective look at La Streisand’s career.
So how good is Barbra Streisand, anyway? Broadway theater manager Santopietro here evaluates Streisand’s professional, not personal, life, discussing details of the latter only as they may have shaped her work. (Marriage to James Brolin, it seems, brings more relaxed singing.) The author divides the book into separate, chronological critiques of Streisand’s work in recordings, film, television, concerts, theater and politics. The scheme results in repetitions, as what Streisand has done in one realm has often spilled over into another, e.g., starring in Broadway and film versions of Funny Girl, then recording albums based on both. Though his tone reveals he’s clearly an enthusiastic Streisand fan, Santopietro is nevertheless objective, placing the diva’s accomplishments on a scale that ranges from “art” to “a waste of an extraordinary, once in a lifetime talent . . .” He finds her early work shooting fireworks, her later work often firing duds. Artistically and commercially, her first albums were hugely successful. Then, rather than record the Gershwin, Porter, Berlin, Rodgers songbooks, as her peers Fitzgerald, Lee and Sinatra did, she turned out albums that recycled early hits with a few new songs thrown in. Early movies—Funny Girl, The Way We Were, What’s Up, Doc?—were brilliant. Later films—The Main Event, For Pete’s Sake—were embarrassing flops. Widely reputed to be a control freak, she often chooses flawed material. Though politically active, she turned away from filming The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s angry chronicle of the AIDS epidemic, to do The Mirror Has Two Faces, yet another film in which her leading man tells her she’s beautiful.
Why the disparities in the diva’s work? Santopietro never really gets to deeper reasons (if anyone can), but his individual critiques are vivid and perceptive.Pub Date: June 13, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-34879-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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