However bold, West’s quotes don’t fully define her iconic life, and Chandler does very little to fill in what’s missing.
A vacuous biography of the little chickadee.
Asked why she donated her used limousines to nuns, West said, “I just can’t stand seeing a nun waiting for a bus.” The is one of a handful of quotes available in this latest from celebrity biographer Chandler (Not the Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford, A Personal Biography, 2008, etc.). Unfortunately, the author offers little perspective on the life of the legendary writer, performer and personality. As in her other “personal biographies,” Chandler offers transcriptions of her long interview sessions with the likes of Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Alfred Hitchcock and others. The memories of a deep bond West shared with her mother are touching, and Chandler offers piquant details of time served in a New York City jail when authorities deemed one of West’s plays obscene. But the author should have heeded George Cukor’s observation that West “always had what you might call a selective memory” and challenged some of the actress’s sometimes dubious assertions. The star said, for example, that her films rescued Paramount Pictures from bankruptcy at the onset of the Great Depression. Chandler lets West’s claim go unchecked, without going over the studio’s balance sheets for other films, or considering how the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields, to say nothing of their directors and writers, also kept Paramount in the black. Chandler also provides scant insight into West’s appeal to the public—or her lack of appeal after the 1930s. The author’s flat plot summaries of West’s films and plays, wedged between West’s eventually tiresome, narcissistic musings, make no distinction between the comic brilliance of She Done Him Wrong and the grotesque excesses of Myra Breckinridge, arguably one of the worst films ever made. She shared her last years with a bodybuilder who rationed the chocolates she ate after dinner, a moment in a sad demise Chandler lets pass without comment.
However bold, West’s quotes don’t fully define her iconic life, and Chandler does very little to fill in what’s missing.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7909-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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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