A glamorously bittersweet showbiz memoir.
Award-winning actress Bergen continues the story begun in the best-selling memoir, Knock Wood (1984).
This second installment of the author’s autobiography focuses on the three great loves of her life: her two husbands and her daughter. When she met her first husband, French director Louis Malle (1932-1995), “[s]parks decidedly did not fly.” Less than a year after their first awkward introduction, however, the two were married. The showbiz woman who “dealt strictly in commerce” was soon immersed in a world of elegance and high art alongside a dynamic man she affectionately calls a “cultural commando.” During the early years of her marriage, Bergen struggled with ambivalence over whether or not to have a family. At age 39, she gave birth to a daughter, Chloe, who would in time become even closer to Bergen than the globe-trotting Malle. Her stalled acting career took off shortly afterward when she was chosen to play the lead in the iconic TV series Murphy Brown. By the early 1990s, the show would inspire a “family values” controversy for its fearless portrayal of a hard-driving career woman who becomes an unwed mother. Bergen admits that the success strained relations with her husband. At the same time, it also helped her to carve out her professional identity as a comedian while giving her the “weight” and “self-definition” she needed to define the boundaries of home and family. Her golden life ground to a temporary halt when Malle was diagnosed with a rare and fatal brain disease. Within three years of his death, however, Bergen met her next husband, billionaire New York real estate developer Marshall Rose. More settled than the peripatetic Malle, Rose not only offered the actress entree among the New York City social elite, he also brought her the next great challenge of her life: learning how to appreciate a life genuinely lived in tandem.
A glamorously bittersweet showbiz memoir.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-684-80827-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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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