A thorough but often graceless narrative of a life that might better have remained shrouded in mystery. Paris (Louise Brooks, 1989) has classic material to work with. Teenage Greta Gustafson is discovered in Stockholm by director Mauritz Stiller, who tyrannizes her, changes her name, makes her a star, and accompanies her to Hollywood. Stiller's career stalls, and he dies a failure. Meanwhile Garbo becomes the familiar icon that her roles frequently mirrored: the perpetually exhausted, gloomy, misunderstood woman with the mesmerizing face. During the period of her stardom and for the 49 years that followed her inadvertent retirement in 1941, Garbo cultivated her pathological, and paradoxical, loathing of publicity and wariness of strangers. This seems to have served not only as a means of self-protection; it was also wise publicity strategy, for she comes off in the reminiscences of her friends and colleagues as paranoid, incurious, and self-absorbed. Paris tellingly repeats Cecil Beaton's observation that ``if she hadn't been `Garbo,' nobody would've wanted to be around her for ten minutes.'' Paris had access to 100 hours of recorded phone conversations between Garbo and art dealer and confidant Sam Green from the 1970s and '80s that portray Garbo as swamped in her own banality, refusing to speak of her films but always ready to complain about her wrinkles, her diet, and her disgust at being recognized in the street. Paris is particularly skillful when detailing Garbo's abortive attempts at a comeback, but the chronology of his anecdotes is sometimes scrambled, and he offers dubious psychosexual insights in his effort to defend an improbably chaste portrait of her: ``Garbo's own innocence was as real as it appeared onscreen, and it was a quality that had to do with love, not sex.'' The prose is often marred by similarly tortuous analyses. Although it leaves her motivations enigmatic, this will likely be the definitive Garbo biography; unfortunately, the story of her life is far less captivating than her screen legacy. (180 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-394-58020-6
Page Count: 634
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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