An enthusiastic homage to a legend.
Meryl Streep, actor, wife, mother, and feminist spokesperson, has had a sensational career.
With 21 Oscar nominations and three wins, along with multiple international acting awards, Streep can aptly be called Queen Meryl, the most celebrated actor in America. Entertainment journalist Carlson (I’ll Have What She’s Having: How Nora Ephron’s Three Iconic Films Saved the Romantic Comedy, 2017) gleefully recounts Streep’s career from her earnest performance as the Virgin Mary in a family Nativity play (she was 6) to her acclaimed roles in The Devil Wears Prada, Iron Lady, and The Post. As a student at the Yale School of Drama, Streep stood out for her ability to create complex characters, and she was often cast in Yale Repertory Theatre shows—while holding down off-campus jobs to pay her tuition. After graduating at 26, she immediately became “a Broadway starlet,” Carlson discovered, thanks to the support of Joe Papp, founder of the Public Theater. Her film career took off in 1977 when she was cast in Julia, a drama starring Jane Fonda. Fonda encouraged Streep to improvise and also “imparted an object lesson in kindness” that inspired Streep’s generosity to her less experienced co-stars. Drawing on a copious number of articles, reviews, profiles, and interviews as well as archival material and a previous biography of Streep, Carlson creates a mostly engaging, deeply admiring chronicle of Streep’s life: her long marriage to sculptor Don Gummer, motherhood, sometimes unexpected role choices, friendships, political activism and views, and the movie synopses, production anecdotes, and reviews that document Streep’s prolific acting career. Although she was highly praised for most of her work, some dissenting voices emerged in the 1980s. “Streep can come off like a piece of fine china, white, hard, perfect,” one critic wrote. She never felt perfect, she admitted, but most of the time, she felt confident. “Usually I think I can play anything,” she told an interviewer in 1980. “I have great faith in myself.”
An enthusiastic homage to a legend.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-48527-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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