In their second biography of an alluring Parisian woman (Misia, 1980, was the first), Fizdale and the late Gold, both concert pianists, show their understanding of the heady artistic world of Paris from 1860 to 1923 and of the special character and needs of performing artists such as Sarah Bernhardt and her theatrical friends. A mercurial creature, living an assortment of roles, Bernhardt is largely known through her own untrustworthy memoirs, her passionate love letters—in which she admits she ``lives for love with fantasy as my guide''—and the opinions of her many distinguished critics and friends, including Hugo, Dumas, Cocteau, Twain, Shaw, Wilde, Freud, Zola, Proust, Henry James, Chekhov, and a whole array of supporting actresses, enemies, and admirers. Born an unwanted and illegitimate child, raised in a convent, initiated at age 16 into the world of the theater and the lucrative role of courtesan by her mother, she died in 1923 at age 78, the first international film star, a rich and charismatic figure acclaimed for her acting every major female role as well as Hamlet. A thin, small lady who suffered stage fright, she had a demonic temper and insatiable appetites for love, power (she came to manage and direct her own theater), companionship (traveling with a legendary entourage), adventure (flying over Paris in a balloon), and collecting everything from animals (she wore live chameleons pinned to her dress) to a skeleton she kept in her bedroom along with the silk-lined coffin in which she liked to learn her lines. Imperious, egotistical, Bernhardt was often selfless: She turned a theater into a hospital, encouraged Zola to champion Dreyfus, devoted herself to her son and his children, and married a Greek actor who became addicted to morphine. Profusely illustrated (50 b&w and eight color pages), full of the wit, gossip, and anecdote Bernhardt loved, this enjoyable book captures her style more than her essence. The newly published love letters alone are a treasure.
Pub Date: Sept. 18, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-52879-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
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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