Nasty and vain, pathetic and dull. (40 b&w photos throughout)
The late photographer’s diaries from the 1970s, in which he assails the rich and famous he dislikes, composes paeans to the ones he favors, and, ultimately, bores with the bulk of his quotidian detail.
Most people will likely give short shrift to this heavily footnoted volume cover-to-cover (the identities of Jacqueline Onassis and Rose Kennedy are spelled out) and will instead skip to the passages of celebrity-trashing. And there are plenty of them. Katharine Hepburn is a “dried-up boot”; Mae West’s “muzzle” resembled an ape’s; Virginia Woolf was a “swine”; Dorothy Parker was “never funny”; Leonard Bernstein was “disgusting and repellent”; Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were vulgar (her breasts were too big); Peggy Guggenheim was “ugly and gauche”; and so on. Perhaps not surprisingly for a visual artist, he placed special emphasis on appearances—especially the ravages of aging—that he most often condemned: sagging breasts, lined faces, too-thick makeup. Ugly furniture and clothing put him off. Words like “horrid” and “appalling” and “hideous” he wielded like weapons. He detested his own physical decline as well, commenting on the unpleasantness delivered by mirrors, and in one truly touching excerpt, he writes of his own prostate surgery and its attendant terrors. He admired Queen Elizabeth II (he was one of the official Royal photographers), found the young Princess Anne ugly, loved his friend named Kin (who managed to have no flaws, in Beaton’s considerable estimation, other than his failure to write letters to Beaton frequently enough), was impressed with Rebecca West and charmed by Coco Chanel. Beaton published sanitized volumes of his diary during his lifetime—and greatly feared the negative criticism that he gleefully heaped on others.
Nasty and vain, pathetic and dull. (40 b&w photos throughout)Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-4112-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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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