Appealing mostly to film buffs—but certainly useful for drag queens. (8 pp. color illustrations, not seen, b&w...
A former costumer who knew the doyenne designer late in her career pens an “official” bio that corrects some of her autobiographical fancies.
Born in 1897 (she said 1907), Edith Head was a slightly cross-eyed, noticeably strong-willed little lady given to occasional prevarication and, at odd times, pinching undeserved acclaim. With her trademark horn-rimmed shades and false bangs, she was the best-known Hollywood costume designer from the days when Clara Bow wore ankle socks with high heels through the zenith of the studio system until her last assignments designing for Miss Piggy and dressing Steve Martin in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. Through the years, she had only two facelifts and only two husbands (self-indulgent Mr. Head and devoted art director Bill Ihnen). As drawn by Chierichetti, her life seems a bit dreary, especially considering the divas and directors with whom she worked. The author describes costumes and explains how fabric, color, and line were marshaled to camouflage the physical flaws of screen goddesses. Dorothy Lamour “had round shoulders and massive buttocks and thighs”; Barbara Stanwyck’s “waist was long and her buttocks flat until they jutted out like a shelf”; and Bette Davis “had several serious problems: bowed legs, very round shoulders, and a long and broad neck. Worst of all were her breasts, which hung almost to her waist.” Also featured: Mae West, Claudette Colbert, Veronica Lake, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, and a large supporting cast. The journeyman text, basted together with movie titles and appliquéd with bust pads, decks out the life of a woman, skilled at studio politics, who craved credits. Head won eight Academy Awards, and her respectful biographer insists that she really could design and draw well. Nevertheless, he depicts a bleak life.
Appealing mostly to film buffs—but certainly useful for drag queens. (8 pp. color illustrations, not seen, b&w illustrations throughout)Pub Date: March 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-019428-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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