Vapid, once-over-lightly reminiscences from the scion of a publishing dynasty who, at age 83, looks back on a privileged, eventful life through rose-colored spectacles. One of five sons of William Randolph Hearst, ``Bill'' (as he's generally known) recalls a bicoastal boyhood that kept him shuttling between a 31-room apartment in Manhattan and his father's California pleasure dome of San Simeon. A college dropout, the author was given a job as a beat reporter on his father's New York American. Appointed publisher in 1937 of what was then the Journal- American, he quickly became a fixture on the cafÇ-society scene. During WW II, Hearst assigned himself to Europe as a correspondent; after the war, he returned to the same old stand, marrying his third wife (who's still with him) in 1948. Following the death of Hearst, Sr., in 1951, the author became the chain's editor-in- chief. Today, he remains titular head of editorial operations and writes a column for the empire's dwindling number of newspapers, but the family firm is controlled by professional managers. With scarcely a word here about his brothers (three of whom are now dead), Hearst offers often inane assessments of family members, friends, and acquaintances (on his father: ``He was in his own way like Pearl Buck who loved the land and the peasants of China''). Nor does Hearst provide keen insights on either the legendary journalists (Bob Considine, Dorothy Kilgallen, Westbrook Pegler, Walter Winchell) or many notables (Winston Churchill, Bing Crosby, Clark Gable, George Patton, George Bernard Shaw, etc.) with whom he came in contact. Hearst has a few harsh words for de Gaulle, Nehru, Richard Berlin (a corporate executive he accuses of working against the founder's legacy), and the producers of Citizen Kane. Otherwise, even in the case of niece Patty's abduction, he is the soul of circumspect discretion. An insider's memoir that reads like the self-censored testimonial of a loyal hack. The wispy text has over 100 photographs and other illustrations, including cartoons (some seen).
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1991
ISBN: 1-879373-04-1
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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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