Travolta deserves a serious book. This is not it.
Incoherent mash note to the man in the white suit.
Celebrity biographer Clarkson (Cruise Control, 2003) here dutifully enumerates John Travolta's film roles, gourmet meals, real-estate purchases and assorted aircraft in a headlong gush of infotainment clichés and tortured syntax. Travolta's story—adored, spoiled scion of a close-knit, showbiz-mad family experiences early success, a string of failures and a series of comebacks—lacks dramatic punch: Even at his lowest points, Travolta remained financially solvent and avoided drugs and alcohol. Mostly, he sulked and over-ate. While Travolta has worked with Robert Altman, Terrence Malick, Quentin Tarantino, Brian De Palma and Mike Nichols, Clarkson has not included a single interesting fact regarding any of these collaborations. We do hear from Danny Terrio. Sorry, film fans. As for analysis of Travolta's craft, Clarkson gamely offers, “all the characters he’d played had become a part of John’s psyche—he was the ultimate chameleon.” Despite Clarkson's puzzling insistence on Travolta's supreme “coolness,” the actor comes off as a dimwitted manchild, gluttonous for sweets and credulous to the point of grotesquerie; Clarkson gingerly handles the controversial subject of Travolta's zealous devotion to Scientology with the dispassion of a man renting a pornographic movie. Clarkson does provide some incidental amusement with the narrative's very ineptness, admiringly comparing Travolta to Mussolini and describing the actor as “a great deliverer of lines” and, two pages later, as having `never been great with lines.` He locates Travolta's hometown of Englewood, N.J., in “Middle America,” and helpfully identifies superstar George Clooney as “now the star of TV’s E.R. and Quentin Tarantino’s blockbuster From Dusk Till Dawn.” Facts recur pointlessly throughout the book, as if the author had forgotten he mentioned them earlier. Best of all, Clarkson repeatedly refers to Travolta's villainous character Terl from the catastrophic science fiction stinker Battlefield Earth as “Teri.”
Travolta deserves a serious book. This is not it.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-84454-125-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: John Blake/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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