An unrevealing and inessential showbiz memoir.
An Emmy Award–winning actor recounts his career and how he “went ‘ass backwards’ into just about everything—and what a lucky guy I’ve been.”
Daniels, a character actor best known for his roles on the TV series St. Elsewhere, Knight Rider, and Boy Meets World, looks back on his career in excruciating detail. Throughout the book, the author delivers mild, occasionally amusing backstage anecdotes, the minutiae of decades-past business and political negotiations—Daniels served briefly as the president of the Screen Actors Guild—and biographical data of little interest to anyone but the author’s family in an unwavering, monotonous, on-the-verge-of-droll voice that evokes nothing but a prim self-regard. Readers looking for salacious showbiz dirt will be disappointed: Daniels remembers Jerome Robbins’ brusque directorial style (Daniels was active on Broadway) and Jason Robards Jr.’s habit of disappearing from set to drink—both observations are very old news—and that’s about it. Daniels provided the voice for the talking car in the ludicrous 1980s program Knight Rider, but he recorded his parts separately and barely met notorious co-star David Hasselhoff. The author discusses the trials of being raised by a relentless stage mother and confesses to a drinking-problem period, but he allows only that it further soured his already prickly demeanor, which feels less than revelatory. Compact, with a regal bearing and a Brahmin accent, the Brooklyn native typically played supercilious establishment types, such as St. Elsewhere’s arrogant surgeon Dr. Mark Craig and Boy Meets World’s stern academic mentor George Feeny, and his prickly, acerbic élan added memorable flavor to such classic films as The Graduate and Two for the Road. Sadly, in book form, Daniels fails to similarly engage or amuse.
An unrevealing and inessential showbiz memoir.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1612348520
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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