A perfectly pleasant double feature.
The Van Johnson Story. Starring . . . Van Johnson.
Davis (History/Southern Methodist Univ.; The Glamour Factory, 1993, etc.) writes books about “movie people,” an enterprise now institutionalized in the Legends of Hollywood Series, of which this is the first installment—and a successful one. Davis tells Johnson’s life story in the breezy, amusing, strangely addictive style of the old MGM musicals in which Johnson used to star. Like Johnson’s films, there’s not much in the way of plot development: East Coast boy dreams of being an actor, becomes a bobby-soxer heartthrob when a car accident knocks him out of WWII (and into countless WWII movies), then spends the next 40 years doing dinner theater. And the protagonist is so fundamentally boring that he made red socks his trademark just to ensure he’d always have something to talk about at cocktail parties. Davis tries to milk what drama he can out of Johnson’s highly debatable sexuality and his disastrous, quasi-arranged marriage, but the star comes off as too obviously closeted for any of it to be terribly titillating. Instead, many of the best moments come from Johnson’s post-Hollywood days, when, between national tours and guest appearances on Batman and The Love Boat, he lounged around his New York apartment in a pair of silk pajamas Rosalind Russell gave him, doing needlepoint and occasionally lunching with Garbo. Perhaps the most frightening thing about Johnson’s life story, though, is the realization that the same studio system that produced the cosseted, thoroughly average, somewhat oblivious Johnson also produced his direct contemporary, a man who went on to serve two terms as president of the country. Davis includes, in lieu of footnotes, a chapter-by-chapter bibliographic essay that lays out the sources for all of his material. One hopes the practice catches on; it works like a dream.
A perfectly pleasant double feature.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-57806-377-9
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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