A breezy, episodic series of autobiographical vignettes and musings on life by the Tony-winning dancer/choreographer/director. Yes, Tommy Tune is his real name, and he drops plenty of other famous ones, from Michael Bennett and Twiggy to Agnes De Mille and Gene Kelly, as he chronicles his odyssey from Texas tyke to Broadway triple-threat. His prose is often perilously folksy- -especially his annoying habit of reproducing the way he talks in words like ``whistlin' '' and ``fascinatin' ''—but, like his friend Carol Channing (portrayed with loving three-dimensionality), Tune is smarter than his public persona suggests. His thoughtful observations on everything from getting older (he's 58) to his tendency toward dead-end relationships give this book more depth than the usual show-biz memoir. Descriptions of his work as a performer (Seesaw, My One and Only, etc.) and director (Nine, Grand Hotel, etc.) are nicely specific (to use a favorite Tune adjective) and offer real insight into how musicals are collaboratively created. The author is generous with praise for coworkers like director Mike Nichols and designer Tony Walton, but frank about artistic disagreements, and merciless in airing personal grievances, as when Lucie Arnaz refused to kiss him onstage because she feared he might have AIDS or when a longtime boyfriend took him to a humiliating Christmas dinner at the apartment of the boyfriend's new lover. Tune is enthusiastically bisexual, and a couple of raunchy sex scenes may offend the squeamish. But his love for the theater and the people who give their lives to it makes this an engaging and occasionally touching work. Scrambled chronology and general vagueness about dates are in keeping with the casual tone. Waxing earthy and ethereal by turns, the six-foot-six Tune here lives up to his dancing teacher's admonition: ``Tommy, you've got your head in the clouds, be sure to keep your feet on the ground.'' (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-84182-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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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