A touching homage to a beloved father and a sufficiently amusing tribute to a comedy legend, but it’s less compelling as a...
The daughter of legendary filmmaker Harold Ramis (1944-2014) chronicles her wild Hollywood upbringing and close relationship with her father.
Even in the pre-internet era, having a permissive and free-wheeling celebrity parent could be challenging, as Stiel proves in detailing her youthful rebelliousness, drug use, and promiscuity. There were, however, obvious advantages as well, ranging from the opportunity to hang out with legendary actors in exotic locations to financial support that enabled a directionless young woman to eventually find her way in the world. By turns frank and fawning when assessing her extended family’s ability to navigate the perils of public life, the author’s affection for her dad, a beloved figure in Hollywood, dominates the narrative. She joins the #metoo movement by (gently) chiding her father for some of the more questionable scenes in his movies and, more movingly, by sharing her own story of abuse at the hands of her mother’s boyfriend at age 9. While there are some juicy nuggets of gossip sprinkled throughout—the most shocking being the revelation that Harold Ramis was the father of Clueless director Amy Heckerling’s daughter—fans looking for new insight into the two-decade rift between Ramis and Bill Murray that followed the completion of Groundhog Day or behind-the-scenes Ghostbusters secrets will be disappointed. The book closes with a sobering account of the director’s long bout with vasculitis, an ordeal his wife kept under wraps in hopes of preserving his ability to return to work if he recovered, depriving his family of support from the entertainment community when they needed it most. After his death, Ramis received an outpouring of love, though the author struggled to come to grips with his passing even as she focused on raising her own children.
A touching homage to a beloved father and a sufficiently amusing tribute to a comedy legend, but it’s less compelling as a memoir.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1787-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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