Forthright, compelling look at a vanished, glittering era of show business.
A crooner’s breezy memoir.
Damone looks back at his life and career, recalling his Depression-era Brooklyn boyhood and his vertiginous trajectory up the pop charts and into the inner circle of the Rat Pack—as well as the arms of some of Hollywood’s most glamorous sirens. Born Vito Farinola in 1928, Damone grew up in Bensonhurst, displaying from earliest childhood a precocious singing ability that led to appearances on local radio programs. He found work as an usher at New York’s legendary Paramount Theater, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Perry Como and Tommy Dorsey, who encouraged the young man in his ambitions. In 1947, the 19-year-old Damone justified his early promise by scoring the massive hit “I Only Have But One Heart.” In the ensuing years, he enjoyed success as a pop singer but never attained the superstar status of buddies Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin. Damone admits to a marked diffidence regarding celebrity and careerism, which is to the book’s benefit. Simultaneously an insider and an outsider, his perspective on his colleagues is refreshingly clear-eyed—though he clearly hero-worships Sinatra, an early supporter and lifelong pal. The author had an eventful private life, and he offers tales of vengeful mobsters, celebrity heartbreak and carousing in Las Vegas at the height of its glamour. The much-married Damone counts the beautiful Italian movie star Pier Angeli and the American singer/actress Diahann Carroll among his former brides, and he dated both Elizabeth Taylor and, on one memorably drunken occasion, Ava Gardner. Damone speaks eloquently about his passion for golf and his conversion to the Baha’i faith, but he is best on the subject of music. A consummate technician, Damone authoritatively analyzes breath control, lyrical interpretation and other aspects of the singer’s art.
Forthright, compelling look at a vanished, glittering era of show business.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-57025-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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
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
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