Offering a well-rounded look at his successful life, Leon’s memoir is self-reflective and encouraging to those who might...
A Tony Award–winning director pays loving tribute to his grandmother as he covers the broad scope of his life.
Leon’s Grandma Mamie had a hard life. She raised 13 children and then took in Leon when he was 4 and kept him for four years while his mother found her own way in the world. Prayer and the belief that her children and grandchildren could have a better life than she had had kept Mamie going, and she pushed Leon to always do his best. “[She] put in those endless days of work and effort,” writes the author, “and her kids never missed a meal. She led that life, that hard, country life, without the comfort of a partnership and some love coming back.” Leon’s love and devotion to his grandmother are evident throughout the narrative of his childhood and his rise through the ranks as an actor and director. The author discusses her cooking, her clothing and colorful hats, the way she talked, and how she almost always had visitors and was happy to throw together a meal for them. He shares his personal doubts and fears as he worked first as an actor and then as a director in the Alliance Theater in Atlanta. He also writes about his relationships with women, his professional working relationship with the playwright August Wilson, his endeavors to bring more diversity to the stage, and the founding of his own theater company, Kenny Leon’s True Colors Theatre Company. The author, who won a Tony for his direction of A Raisin in the Sun in 2014, shows how the supportive words and actions of his closest family members instilled in him a strong confidence in his ability to dream big and overcome the obstacles in his path.
Offering a well-rounded look at his successful life, Leon’s memoir is self-reflective and encouraging to those who might harbor self-doubts about their own abilities and pursuits.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5387-4497-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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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