By Kirk Douglas
"Don't be afraid," Douglas's mother told him decades ago when she was dying. "It happens to everyone." Those words didn't help when Douglas, 85, suffered a stroke in 1996. What started as a tickling sensation, "as if a pointed object had drawn a line from my temple, made a half circle on my cheek and stopped," became the most terrifying ordeal of Douglas's life—one that weakened his right side, temporarily robbed him of intelligible speech and nearly led him to suicide. This account of his recovery and the increased compassion and spirituality his stroke brought him is cliché-ridden (he compares old actors to the Energizer Bunny) and long on name-dropping (when he contemplated shooting himself, it was with the gun he used in 1957's Gunfight at the O.K. Corral with Burt Lancaster). But Douglas redeems himself with poignant musings on the deaths of old friends like Jack Lemmon and Anthony Quinn. And you have to hand it to him for never losing his sense of humor about himself. After accepting an award in less-than-flawless German at the Berlin Film Festival last February, he declares: "I think the German language sounds better with a stroke." (Morrow, $22.95)
Bottom Line: Too few moments of emotion
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