An impassioned plea for humanity to evolve toward what the author describes as “one of its greatest qualities: mercy.”
The French cinema icon shares her post-film journey of animal activism.
Known around the world as a rebellious, sometimes-scandalous sex symbol, Bardot (Brigitte Bardot: My Life in Fashion, 2016, etc.) retired from acting in 1973 to focus on advocating for animal rights. In this memoir, she provides an intimate look at her motives and experiences in fighting for the well-being of animals. Among the first celebrities to use their fame to draw public awareness to issues of animal cruelty, Bardot delivered international attention to the plight of seals when she arrived in Canada in 1977. The author implicitly connects her past objectification as an actor with the situation facing animals, as she frequently discusses her animal instinct, nature, and soul. “I’ve known treachery, perversity, faithlessness, ingratitude, and cowardice that man is capable of,” she writes. “I’ve hated humanity’s penchant for destruction and became animal in order not to belong to the inhuman cohort that made me so ashamed.” Chronicling more than four decades, the narrative is an unapologetic story of how Bardot dedicated her considerable star power to improving animal welfare. Since her retirement from acting, she has found herself on the front lines of rescue efforts around the world, and she established a nonprofit organization, La Fondation Brigitte Bardot, to advance public awareness and improve conditions for all animals. This is not a book of theories about animal rights; nor does it provide a detailed, linear description of the author’s work. Indeed, parts of the narrative are scattered and jarred by awkward transitions. Still, Bardot shares an emotional, highly personal testimony of her decades of animal activism. Some of the firsthand accounts of deplorable animal conditions may be too intense for some readers, but they serve as urgent calls to action. Throughout, Bardot acknowledges both the individuality of animals and the animal nature of humanity, connecting the dots between species with a heartfelt memoir of personal and social change.
An impassioned plea for humanity to evolve toward what the author describes as “one of its greatest qualities: mercy.”Pub Date: May 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948924-02-3
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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
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
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