A solid reference and affectionate remembrance, but a rather toothless biography.
Veteran celebrity biographer Spoto (Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies, 2008, etc.) capitalizes on his personal friendship with actress and honest-to-goodness princess Grace Kelly (1929–1982) to create an affectionate, informative, though somewhat bland account of the screen icon’s life.
Kelly was born into a well-established, wealthy Philadelphia family and enjoyed the privileged upbringing typical for a girl of her class, though she suffered from a lifelong sense of alienation from her success-oriented father and her cold, disapproving mother. With her unforgettable patrician good looks, Kelly found instant success as a model and quickly made a name for herself on the Broadway stage, abetted by such influential family members such as her uncle, playwright George Kelly. Hollywood beckoned, and Kelly made a handful of classic films, including The Country Girl (1954), for which she won an Academy Award; the musical High Society (1956), co-starring Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby; and three pictures with the legendary Alfred Hitchcock: Dial M for Murder, Rear Window (both 1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955). Spoto is particularly interested in the relationship between Hitchcock and his muse, a fraught collaboration complicated by the director’s possessive, unrequited passion for the beautiful actress. Kelly famously left show business to marry Prince Rainier III of Monaco, where she devoted the balance of her short life to raising her children and to matters of state. Spoto identifies Kelly’s fresh, affectless acting style as the key to her cinematic appeal, and goes on at length about her aptitude for “high comedy,” which evidently consists of polite farce free of vulgarity or unpleasantness. The author, a meticulous writer, is guilty of placing Kelly on a pedestal, much as her character is damagingly “worshipped” in High Society. Instead of digging for new or surprising insights into her work or persona, Spoto repeatedly praises Kelly’s fine spirit and refutes the claims of the actress’s rumored promiscuousness.
A solid reference and affectionate remembrance, but a rather toothless biography.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-39561-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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