Pumps a lot of bilge overboard. (13 b&w illustrations)
Astute scrutiny of “the perilous and fascinating lines between fact and fiction, between desire and contempt, between knowledge and doubt,” as demonstrated in critical and biographical treatments of the iconic sex goddess.
Monroe is a brutally oversold image, writes Churchwell (Literature and Culture/Univ. of East Anglia), “an icon of desirability and a stereotype of pathological femininity.” On the one hand, Monroe is a myth, relecting and sanctioning our cultural values; on the other, as Churchwell makes clear, her symbolic relationship to femininity, sexuality, Hollywood, and celebrity has become what the author calls a dead metaphor, “a metaphor that has lost its figurative power, and gets taken literally.” Churchwell wades into the various biographies, biographical novels, plays, and photo-essay, from Fred Guiles and Barbara Leaming to Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, and the truly weird Frank Capell, staunch anticommunist and hater of all things Kennedy. With sparkling clarity, she analyzes how these works feed our notions of spectacle, commodity, and representation. Worst of all, they just don’t get it right: Churchwell, who can be coruscating, dubs one psychological profile “stupid to the point of incomprehensibility.” She’s an author of the if-it-looks-smells-and-tastes-like-an-apple-it-is-an-apple school of thought. Writing about Leaming’s comment that the skin-tight gold lamé Monroe wore in 1952 to an awards ceremony showed that the actress was “hell-bent on self-destruction,” Churchwell dryly adds, “rather than the more obvious goal of self-promotion.” She would like to liberate Monroe from such glib characterizations, especially those that use the name the actress discarded to make sentimental assumptions about her “real” personality. “Marilyn Monroe was a real person,” she writes. “It is Norma Jeane who is the fiction, the cultural figment, the ghost of the real invoked as a death sentence.” Speaking of which, she also stirs up serious dust in examining Monroe’s death. Churchwell claims she’s not out to paint a new portrait, but to understand the genesis and purpose of the stories that swarm around Monroe. Turns out she does quite well on both fronts.
Pumps a lot of bilge overboard. (13 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7818-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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