A compelling exploration of a beguiling film icon’s life—a significant if not quite definitive addition to the ever...
A deep dive into the model and screen legend’s glamorous but troubled life.
In the decades since Marilyn Monroe’s (1926-1962) death, our fascination with her remains strong. Her allure has sparked the imaginations of talents ranging from Andy Warhol to Joyce Carol Oates to the producers of the TV series Smash, and she has been the subject of countless biographies. In his latest book, Casillo (The Marilyn Diaries, 2014, etc.) rehashes much family material about Monroe, but he pays particularly sympathetic attention to her emotional journey. Delving into the well-known narrative points, he begins with Monroe’s unhappy and frequently abusive childhood. Dependent on a single mother who was suffering from severe mental health issues, she was frequently put into foster care and at one point abandoned in an orphanage. As Monroe blossomed into a stunningly attractive young woman, a modeling career quickly led to minor film roles and subsequent star turns in such 1950s classics as Gentleman Prefer Blondes and The Seven Year Itch. While developing into one of the most famous movie stars of her time, she increasingly struggled with deep insecurities and dependency on pills and alcohol. Her acting talent continued to expand, but by the early 1960s, her personal life was plummeting. Often feeling paralyzed by low self-esteem working in front of the camera, she often displayed erratic behavior that caused long delays on film sets. This accelerated during production of her last completed film, The Misfits, and influenced a fatal blow with her dismissal from the ill-fated Something’s Got to Give. Casillo focuses a good portion of the book on Monroe’s fragile emotional state in these remaining years. She had an obsessive fear of aging and losing her sexual appeal. While not offering much new information, the author thoughtfully re-examines the facts and myths surrounding the events leading to Monroe’s death, touching on her affairs with both John and Robert Kennedy and her continued substance abuse problems.
A compelling exploration of a beguiling film icon’s life—a significant if not quite definitive addition to the ever expanding Monroe literature.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-09686-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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