A grounded and consistently absorbing biography.
A dual biography of entertainment legends Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson that explores their individual careers and personal lives leading up to and including their 25-year friendship.
There was no end to the media coverage shadowing Taylor and Jackson throughout much of their lives. In this exhaustively researched new book, Bogle (Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters, 2011, etc.) revisits some of the familiar details but with a fresh and fair-minded perspective. His intent is not to expose startling new facts or dish on the more lurid rumors but rather to provide some clarity regarding their more vulnerable human qualities. The author devotes the first two-thirds of the book to their individual stories leading up to their first encounter. Through alternating chapters, he traces how both had achieved fame, along with the associated consequences, at very early stages in their lives; each was to remain in the increasingly bright though frequently harsh spotlight for the rest of their lives, as masters and victims of their stardom. Taylor attracted attention onscreen through memorable performances in such films as A Place in the Sun (1951) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and off-screen through her numerous marriages and love affairs, along with multiple ailments and life-threatening illnesses. She later found her most satisfying work through her efforts promoting AIDS awareness and research as co-founder of the American Foundation for AIDS Research. Jackson experienced immediate fame as lead singer of the Jackson 5 and later achieved record-breaking triumphs as a solo artist with his many hit albums. Yet controversy stalked him throughout his later career with reports of child molestation, drug use, and threats of financial ruin. Their meeting in 1984 would prove a highpoint for each, quickly establishing a mutual devotion that would serve to nourish their lives throughout their remaining years. Devoted fans of either star may be familiar with much of this material, but they will appreciate the balance and compassion underscoring Bogle’s treatment.
A grounded and consistently absorbing biography.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4516-7697-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
PERSPECTIVES
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