An honest, eloquent, memorable autobiography.
The diminutive, unforgettable creator of the emcee in Cabaret both on stage and on screen writes frankly of his diverse career, exacting mother, and public embrace of his homosexuality.
Although Joel Grey, born Joel Katz in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932, hated the role of master of ceremonies that he seemed to command from an early age, he unlocked the character in 1966 after 15 years of struggling to fulfill his dream of creating his own role on Broadway. His portrayal of the emcee in Hal Prince’s Broadway production of Cabaret emerged as brilliantly “mercenary, lascivious, and menacing” and made his career, earning him Tony and Academy awards. The first son to Grace Epstein and musician Mickey Katz, who eventually played with Spike Jones in Los Angeles, where the family moved in 1945, Grey caught the acting bug early on in Cleveland theaters, where, as a short, pixie-ish kid, he felt accepted and loved. However, his ambivalent sexuality meant that he had both girlfriends and secret boyfriends, and when he had to reveal a seduction by a male friend, his mother turned away from him emotionally. The theater, then, became his haven, and instead of pursuing his dream of college at UCLA, he dove into the nightclub circuit, represented by big-time agents. As Grey writes, “achieving some level of fame could protect me from the kind of rejection I had experienced from my own mother after she discovered I had had an affair with another man.” Marriage to a fellow actress brought out his intense yearning for fatherhood and domesticity, and although the couple had two children and many years of happiness, Grey’s inability to sanction his wife’s own career and his latent homosexuality doomed the marriage. In the last few chapters, the author elucidates his stunning Cabaret success and “coming out” in the role of Ned Weeks in Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart in the mid-1980s.
An honest, eloquent, memorable autobiography.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-05723-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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
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
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