Did they or didn’t they? Lively (if largely warmed-over) scandal that should find an appreciative audience among fans of...
A tell-all account of the glamorous stars of 1930s and ’40s Hollywood who practiced lesbian love.
McLellan (Ear on Washington, not reviewed) has honed her skill at political gossip to a fine art in Washington, writing a popular newspaper column called “The Ear.” Few of the names she outs will surprise even modest fans of film history: silent screen actress Alla Nazimova, Louise Brooks, Talullah Bankhead, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo—to say nothing of Natasha Rambova, the ubiquitous Mercedes de Acosta, and screenwriter Salka Viertel. The juice is in the details. For instance, we learn that for decades Dietrich and Garbo denied they had ever met, even though they were rising stars in Europe at about the same time, came to Hollywood within a few years of each other, and shared friends among Hollywood’s European community. The author thinks she knows why: she has discovered an early German film featuring Garbo in which Dietrich played a minor role. An affair was likely, McLellan speculates, but Garbo kept the lid on by threatening (through Viertel) to expose Dietrich’s connection to Communist spy Otto Katz (allegedly Dietrich’s first husband). The soup of personal and political intrigue thickens as the girls trade lovers and Bankhead and Dietrich keep the phones to FBI director “Jack” Hoover buzzing. There’s even a thin thread that connects Nancy Reagan’s mother to the network. But Dietrich is by far the most interesting character in the mélange, virtually flaunting her sexual escapades with both men and women. She nevertheless earned a medal from the US government for her work in WWII, while Garbo scurried for cover.
Did they or didn’t they? Lively (if largely warmed-over) scandal that should find an appreciative audience among fans of these early film stars and their coteries.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-24647-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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