Although she gives a thoughtful and detailed recounting of Vincent Price’s career, his daughter sticks too closely to the facts to make this biography anything special—a disappointment, considering the potential. Victoria Price, a television screenwriter, was born when her father was already 50, so that might account for some of the distance from her subject matter. But, then, where is the yearning for the absent father? The daughter is dispassionate to a fault. She starts off with the history of her family, which is standard enough. Yet she doesn’t add any family stories or personal remembrances that would soften the narrative, even when she gets to material about which she would have firsthand knowledge. Instead, she gives a straightforward, almost day-to-day account of her father’s whereabouts. He grew up, visited Europe, went to Yale, started acting in England, and so on. When Price gets to Broadway in the 1930s and to Hollywood at the end of that decade, his personal life, by this account, is over. For the next 50 years, from Service De Luxe in 1938, when he was 27, to Edward Scissorhands in 1990, three years before his death, his daughter merely recounts him going from set to set for over 100 films. Even when Victoria gets to her own time with her father, she doesn’t get to her emotions. “I hardly remember seeing my father during this time at all,” she writes about her preteen years, when her father and mother divorced. Instead of delving into what it was about her father that led him him to work so much and spend so little time with his children, she goes back to reciting his whereabouts. Price married three times, had a son and a daughter 22 years apart, collected art, and was investigated by the government during the 1950s for suspected communist activities. These are the things readers want to know about in detail, not the run-down on the cast of Laura. (32 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-24273-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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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