A diverting meander through a life in showbiz.
The handsome actor reminisces about the passing of a more glamorous Hollywood, settles some old scores and examines his passionate relationship with Natalie Wood.
Perhaps best known for his role as the suave, mystery-solving millionaire on the TV series Hart to Hart, Wagner grew up struggling to please his distant, disapproving father. As a young actor, he was drawn to an older generation of male stars, idolizing and befriending the likes of James Cagney and Clark Gable in a bid for more congenial paternal lights to steer by. This identification with an older style of movie glamour slightly marginalized Wagner as the Method propelled intense, mumbling actors like James Dean and Paul Newman to superstardom, leaving him to flounder in a series of forgettable, lightweight parts. The preternaturally good-looking young man still managed to enjoy himself, cutting a mighty swath through hordes of hopeful starlets and not a few more mature actresses, including a memorable layover with the sultry Yvonne De Carlo. Wagner recounts these adventures in surprisingly salty detail, which is great fun. Less fun are his gripes about producers’ and directors’ unfairness or incompetence, tales of real-estate deals, anecdotes about children and the like, which will tax the patience of even the most generous reader. Fortunately, he provides much more gripping material concerning his stormy relationship with Wood. They were one of the original celebrity couples: Married in 1957, separated in 1961 and divorced a year later, they remarried in 1972 and were still together when she tragically drowned in a 1981 boating accident that has invited morbid speculation for decades. Wagner is open about the emotional torment he suffered during their separation, confessing to murderous feelings toward Warren Beatty, Wood’s post-divorce boyfriend. His account of the fateful boat trip, which included a protracted, nearly violent argument between Wagner and eccentric actor Christopher Walken, delivers a mesmerizing sense of queasy fatefulness.
A diverting meander through a life in showbiz.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-137331-2
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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