A capable account of the life and times of one of the greats of the silent-movie era. Combining emotionally subtle, naturalistic acting with a sweet, wholesome demeanor, Pickford was one of the world's first film stars. For more than a decade she reigned as ``America's Sweetheart,'' starring in such silent classics as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917) and Pollyanna (1920). As Whitfield relates, her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks in 1920 attracted the kind of attention and adulation normally reserved for royal weddings, and indeed, the two were often referred to as Hollywood's ``royal couple.'' Our age might be celebrity-obsessed, but the devotion paid to Pickford seem almost unintelligible today. This doggerel verse from the New York Dramatic Mirror, cited by Whitfield, was all too typical: ``Silent enchantress! Are any as blind to you/As not to feel the glad charm of your art?/Time spare the youth of you, fortune be kind to you,/Queen of the Movies and queen of my heart!'' Reluctant to break from the image that had made her so successful, Pickford continued to play adolescent girls—and sometimes boys—into her late 30s. Then sound was introduced, and though she'd been theater-trained, she just couldn't make the transition successfully. Her last years were straight out of Sunset Boulevard (for which she auditioned), as she took to drinking and reclusively shut herself away in her mansion. Whitfield, a film critic for Toronto Life, does a thorough but unexciting job of chronicling Pickford's career, from her desperately poor childhood in Canada (she went on the stage, originally, to help provide for her family) to her reluctant debut in films to her key role in founding United Artists. Sadly, many of Pickford's films have vanished. Any record of these losses, even an unremarkable one such as Whitfield's, thus ought to be valued by those who care about film. (60 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8131-2045-4
Page Count: 410
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
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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