A warm and well-researched yet ultimately inessential appreciation of one of Hollywood’s largely forgotten stars.
Spoto spotlights Wright.
Acclaimed Hollywood biographer Spoto (The Redgraves: A Family Epic, 2012, etc.), who has penned books about Joan Crawford, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, James Dean, Elizabeth Taylor, and others, returns with an affectionate portrait of actress Teresa Wright (1918-2005), best known for her roles in Shadow of a Doubt, The Little Foxes, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Mrs. Miniver, for which Wright won an Academy Award for best supporting actress. Unfortunately for Spoto, after that run of films in the early 1940s, Wright’s star faded precipitously as the result of a highly publicized contract dispute with studio head Samuel Goldwyn, and her career afterward consisted of well-regarded—but hardly iconic—work on stage, screen, and lesser parts in lesser films. It’s hardly the stuff of high drama, and the author’s account of Wright’s personal life similarly fails to enthrall, as a relatively civilized divorce from her first husband and a sometimes-prickly relationship with her second, playwright Robert Anderson, mark the dramatic peaks of this material. Wright was a wonderfully bracing actress in her clutch of classic early roles. She was fresh-faced, winsome, emotionally direct and fiercely intelligent, and it’s a shame her talent was undervalued by the studio brass. However, her story lacks a compelling arc, and her cultural impact does not justify the in-depth descriptions of her homes, friendships, children’s lives, and sundry other personal details diligently recorded here. Spoto writes of his long personal friendship with Wright, and his admiration and respect register clearly in his characteristically literate, engaging, and authoritative prose. She does come across as a wonderful person to know, but as a biographical subject, she leaves readers wanting.
A warm and well-researched yet ultimately inessential appreciation of one of Hollywood’s largely forgotten stars.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62846-045-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2016
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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