Life of legendary Jean Harlow, rescued from an abyss of scandal by journalist Golden. (One hundred illustrations, including exclusive family candids, not seen here.) Golden's is a well-researched, straightforwardly written bio with some but not too much background filler about MGM and the Thirties and with no urge to be memorably stylish or sumptuously lighted by MGM—though the publisher will undoubtedly make a gorgeous art deco production out of this smartly priced book. Born Harlean Carpenter in 1911, Harlow died at 26 of irreversible kidney failure brought on by an infection—from that early death her later biographer Irving Shulman fashioned the sleaze-riot Harlow: An Intimate Biography that has hidden the real Harlow for the past quarter century. From Kansas City, Missouri, Jean married a wealthy orphan at 16, divorced him at 20, by which time she'd already gotten parts as a film extra, then been taken on by Howard Hughes for some breast-peepery in Hell's Angels and kept out on loan until MGM bought her from Hughes. At MGM, she struck gold as a platinum vamp, a limitation she overcame as a comedienne in the fast-talking satire Bombshell. Her second marriage to top MGM producer Paul Bern ended with Bern's suicide; her third to MGM cameraman Hal Rosson ended in disaffection. She was engaged to William Powell, 18 years her senior (all her men were father figures) when she died. Along the way, she and Gable had become the first great team of the talkies. Saratoga, their last picture together, was completed by a double. Going by her friends' comments, Harlow was a joyful, warmhearted, generous woman, perhaps slightly undersexed, who smoked but never drank or drugged, was not foulmouthd, and clearly was a gifted comedienne. A compelling story—but add in the production values on this book.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1991
ISBN: 1-55859-214-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abbeville Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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