Uncritical, unoriginal, sometimes downright sappy—just like most love letters. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Celebrity biographer Spoto (Notorious: The Life of Ingrid Bergman, 1997, etc.) glides smoothly across the silken surface
of the life of one of this century's most famous women. Seldom is heard a discouraging word in this tribute. In its three sections (Miss Bouvier, Mrs. Kennedy, and Mrs. Onassis) Spoto has set himself a difficult task: to force into the foreground of the Kennedy legend a woman who spent most of her adult life—the post-assassination portion—seeking the shadows. Accordingly, he emphasizes her "remarkable ability as a quick sketch artist"; her skills as a "hilarious mimic"; her grace on horseback; her failed first engagement in 1952; her broken ankle (suffered in a game of touch football with the Kennedys); her leading role in the publication of JFK's Profiles in Courage (1956); her devotion to culture and the arts (Spoto convincingly portrays her as a true intellectual rather than a dilettante); the "almost manic discontent" she experienced during the years immediately after the assassination; her lucrative, laissez-faire marriage to Aristotle Onassis; and her career as an editor, first at Viking (she resigned after a misunderstanding involving the publication of a novel featuring Sen. Edward Kennedy), then at Doubleday, where in the 1980s, says Spoto, she "produced some of the most interesting books of the decade." Spoto struggles to explain Jackie's apparent acceptance of JFK's many extramarital affairs (perhaps she "simply decided that a certain profligacy was part of a man's character"), and he seems determined to establish her as an American queen, asserting that she and JFK "adopted precisely the style of the modern British monarchy." Some of his observations, however, are ludicrous—for instance, that her composure derives from her "alliance with horses," or that she was the "first non-Hollywood star in American history" (Charles Lindbergh? Babe Ruth?).
Uncritical, unoriginal, sometimes downright sappy—just like most love letters. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-24650-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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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