Star-studded, gossipy, and engaging.
The daughter of celebrities reflects on fame, parenthood, and style.
Costume designer Tynan makes her literary debut in a candid and entertaining memoir featuring her alcoholic, combative parents, theater critic Kenneth Tynan and novelist Elaine Dundy, and their assorted glamorous friends. Growing up in England and New York in the 1950s and ’60s, the author observed her parents engaged in constant “frenzied feverish activity” of parties, openings, and dinners. “I now realize,” she writes, “that my parents were the original celebrity hounds. They relentlessly and unabashedly pursued famous people.” They had little time for their only child, leaving her in the care of a changing cast of nannies. Besides their flaming fights, which resulted in broken pottery and drunken rages, the two openly had affairs. “When I was ten years old,” Tynan recalls laconically, “they decided theirs would be an open marriage. They deemed this the solution to their compulsive infidelity.” Her parents eventually divorced, and her mother spiraled into depression; her father, remarried, still pursued other women. Tynan looked at their behavior, including her father’s predilection for sadomasochism, “with a kind of voyeuristic fascination.” But her upbringing shaped her own relationship to alcohol, drugs, and men. For a while, she suffered from vaginismus, caused, she believes, by “a fear of sex” incited by her parents’ fights. Besides chronicling her erratic family, Tynan reveals her development as a fashionista and costume designer. At the age of 14, with her own clothing allowance, she followed her taste and instincts to hone a distinctive style. Each chapter focuses on some article of clothing (her first bra, sumptuous apple-green shoes) that evokes an episode of her life. “What was I going to wear?” becomes a familiar refrain as Tynan recounts social events and job interviews where she wanted to make a notable impression. Her vivid descriptions reflect her love of clothes, designers, fabrics, and, not least, shopping.
Star-studded, gossipy, and engaging.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2368-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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