Adoring life of Hepburn (``the prettiest, sweetest angel in heaven''), written with help from the actress (1929-93) herself during her final year. Support from Hepburn clearly helped Maychick (Meryl Streep, 1984) straighten out the actress's background: noble Dutch lineage; early years in the Netherlands under the Nazis; Resistance activities; dysfunctional family; first inroads of her eating disorder; misfire as a dancer; first films in Britain, and so on. But Maychick got less help on the real dirt, such as Hepburn's affair with married William Holden (``the love of her life''), whom she dumped when he said he'd had an irreversible vasectomy and couldn't have children. A chubby child with an addiction to chocolate, Hepburn turned off all interest in food during the war years, especially when driven by the Nazis into hiding alone for a month in a cellar, where she created a purposeful distaste for what she couldn't have. She hit it big simultaneously on Broadway— having been discovered by Colette herself to play Gigi—and in Hollywood, winning on the same night an Oscar and a British Film Institute citation as best actress (both for Roman Holiday). A Tony (for Giradoux's Ondine) and a cover story in Time soon followed— but few fans knew that Hepburn had little background in Hollywood films, or that her gamin innocence was the real thing. (Asked how he liked ``working with that dream girl'' in Sabrina, Bogart replied, ``She's okay, if you like to do 36 takes.'') Hepburn's marriage to lesser star Mel Ferrer drained her, as did some miscarriages, though a son finally came. She died of colon cancer right after visiting Somalia for UNICEF. Hepburn lends a gripping spine to Maychick's styleless but serviceable effort. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs) (First serial to Cosmopolitan)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55972-195-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1993
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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