An American life considered with art and understanding in a major work of biography. (40 photos in text)
Robust update and emendation of the entertainer’s well-known autobiography.
Sammy Davis Jr. (1925–90) wasn’t black inside, wasn’t white outside, writes Haygood (The Haygoods of Columbus, 1997, etc.). He was simply a performer. He never spent a day in a classroom. Soon after Sammy learned to walk, he learned to work. Under the aegis of his father and adoptive uncle, veteran vaudeville hoofers, he mastered flash dancing and the soft shoe. The hardscrabble life was exhausting and exhilarating, but the prodigy of “The Will Mastin Trio starring Sammy Davis Jr.” had energy to burn. He danced, sang, played various instruments, and did spot-on mimicry. Life on the road in the biz wasn’t life on the streets or the ghetto. Sammy’s buddies were Jerry Lewis, Tony Curtis, Jeff Chandler, and Eddie Cantor (without blackface) as well as the Step Brothers and the Nicholas Brothers. Color meant little until a quick stint in the Army brought a new awareness that he was not white, as many who knew him thought he wanted to be. Though he had previously married a black showgirl at the strong behest of the Mob, he preferred white women, especially blonds like Kim Novak and May Britt, whom he married. Throughout, he had a complex relationship with generous, arrogant Frank Sinatra. Sammy’s insatiable need for approval brought him to Richard Nixon, but he was no handkerchief-head, asserted friends like Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier (fighting popular black opinion). Haygood uses “Negro” consistently until the time in his narrative when “black” becomes favored as the story advances from Bill Robinson and Marcus Garvey past the Rat Pack to porn stars at the Davis Hollywood home. The movies, the clubs, the Broadway shows, the spending, the devastating results of bad driving, and the demons are all covered perceptively.
An American life considered with art and understanding in a major work of biography. (40 photos in text)Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-40354-X
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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