May cause the reader to feel the need of a long hot shower.
A lackluster exposé of Latin superstar Trevi, her manager, and their sexual and professional misadventures with a troupe of very young wannabe pop stars.
Gloria Trevino (stage name: “Trevi”) always wanted to be a singer, and she got her shot when she was only 18 and paired up with producer Sergio Andrade. While Girl Trouble is ostensibly about the incredibly popular Trevi, it’s actually the story of this man, the master puppeteer who engineered the star’s success. Andrade trained Gloria, brought her to the public, then saw to it that her wild personality was packaged for maximum salability. Unfortunately for Trevino and dozens of other young girls, Andrade had a sadistic streak and an insatiable appetite for 13-year-olds. Once his reputation as a producer was established—and that was well before Trevino appeared—Andrade was able to recruit adolescent girls at will by promising a “performance scholarship” at his “special school.” McDougall reveals exactly what this means with a wealth of cringe-inducing examples ranging from auditions that required full-body physicals to the isolation of girls from their families—and that doesn’t even touch on the group sex. Andrade kept up the myth of a training academy for a remarkable period of time and married a series of teenaged brides, until one of them whose career never took off finally published a tell-all book about what was really going on. Why did the girls put up with it? Their extreme youth is the likeliest reason, although why their families accepted fishy circumstances is a harder call. McDougall, currently writer-at-large for Philadelphia magazine, dips into various studies of brainwashing in an effort to explain, possibly hoping to elevate the material out the realm of the purely sensational. But despite his extensive research and jailhouse interviews with both Andrade and Trevino, the work feels plodding—and overblessed with italics.
May cause the reader to feel the need of a long hot shower.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-053662-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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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