An account of an extraordinary life, marred by excessive angst.
A former actress struggles with a bout of spiritual ennui in this memoir.
Lewis (Between Men, 1995) had a life that most people would envy: she was married to a successful movie producer; enjoyed glamorous careers as an actress, model, and writer; and traveled the globe. However, in 2004, when she was in her 50s, she was struck with regret and furious at the prospect that she had squandered her promise: “Is this it? Is this the life I meant myself to have?” She stumbled upon a book, The Unquiet Grave by the literary critic Cyril Connolly, and she related to his desire for a house in France; later, she was invited to visit an English friend of hers in the French countryside. While there, she fell in love with an old, dilapidated château and decided to buy it as a summer home and oversee its much-needed renovations. The author’s husband was incensed, she says, but he reluctantly paid most of the cost of the house and loaned her a substantial sum for the repairs. Lewis’ memoir jumps back and forth in time, recounting a life of youthful adventure as well as her struggle to superintend an exasperatingly complex construction project. She tells of growing up in England, attending school in France, and eventually becoming a model, a minor actress in mostly B movies, and finally, a serious writer. Along the way, she rubbed shoulders with plenty of celebrities, including Roman Polanski, with whom she says she had an affair, and Orson Welles. The author’s prose is refined and worldly, and she memorably and candidly provides keen insights into the decades she inhabited; for example, her libertine response to her discomfort over the 1960s sexual revolution doubles as astute social commentary. However, some readers may find it difficult to truly empathize with her existential torment, which, given the enormous privilege that she’s enjoyed, seems disconnected from real, abiding struggle. Her life story is a truly fascinating one, and readers may be tempted to wonder why it’s the source of so much frustration.
An account of an extraordinary life, marred by excessive angst.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68245-082-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Regan Arts
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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