Fantastic? Hardly.
Skin-deep treatment of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s rise and rise.
Kennedy family biographer Leamer (Sons of Camelot, 2004, etc.) re-creates their most famous in-law as a shallow and aggrandizing man—pretty much like the persona Schwarzenegger has already created for himself. While a boy growing up in Austria, Arnold was overshadowed by a winsome brother, nurtured by a protective mother and beaten by a brutish father. Admittedly not a reader, the youngster trained his body into enormity so he could do one thing: leave Austria and become a star. Schwarzenegger achieved his goal and shrewdly conquered the worlds of bodybuilding and feature films before capitalizing on the opportunity to live out his dream of American civic duty. Leamer halfheartedly dresses this cocky suprahuman in an underdog’s cloak of self-deprecation, shilling anecdotes about Schwarzenegger’s crippling need to be admired. Entertaining if farcical tales about Conan the Barbarian and Terminator soon reach the same editorialized conclusion: that it was Schwarzenegger alone who made these movies successful. Leamer dispenses casual nods to hot topics like Arnold’s steroid use and aggressive womanizing, but each time he’s exonerated with a shrug. Meanwhile, the author’s assurances that his subject is not anti-Semitic, which take Arnold’s crush on a married Jewish woman, and dealings with Jewish associates as enough to disprove prejudice, similarly duck an issue that could have made this an interesting consideration of contemporary immigrant success. Leamer’s refusal to write with a critical eye means that Schwarzenegger’s true self remains unknown. Stories from those who do know him fumble inelegantly across the page without finesse, as do superfluous nuggets concerning political rivals. The author concedes that Arnold Schwarzenegger is a man who cannot be told the truth. It’s a moment of rare candor in a biography that mostly settles for skimming the surface.
Fantastic? Hardly.Pub Date: June 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33338-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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