Full of informed and intelligent observations regarding both Wood's mindset and the politics of Hollywood, but ultimately a...
An easily familiar biography of the actress, from a personal friend who fails to connect some of the critical pieces in her puzzle.
It’s clear from the get-go that screenwriter, novelist, and biographer Lambert (Mainly About Lindsay Anderson, 2000, etc.) is in Wood's corner. In his telling, she was a pure, instinctive talent brought low by those around her who, knowingly or not, released the demons within. Or, in the case of her manipulative stage mother, simply crippled Natalie by blurring the line between fact and fantasy. Once she had made the unlikely jump from child star to adult star, the boogies crept out in great supply, leading to personal and professional failures. Yet what also marked Wood, Lambert amply demonstrates, was a vast reservoir of acting ability. Handed cut-rate roles by Warner Bros.—Lambert knows well how to paint the ratty behavior of the major studios, which felt they had the right to destroy careers—she not only overcame but often elevated them. When given the opportunity to stretch herself with fine material in Rebel Without a Cause, Splendor in the Grass, and Love with a Proper Stranger, she shone. Wood could handle satire too, as witness Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, and she harpooned the Harvard Lampoon when they voted her Worst Actress. Yet her industrial-strength insecurities (thanks to mom, Lambert convincingly asserts) led her to seek approval in all the wrong places and test those closest to her, namely, Robert Wagner. Not surprisingly, Warren Beatty and Christopher Walken don't have anything of value to say regarding their relations with Wood, which leaves the stage to wine, vodka, and pharmaceuticals. She couldn't have asked for a worse supporting cast.
Full of informed and intelligent observations regarding both Wood's mindset and the politics of Hollywood, but ultimately a wearying, depressing portrait. (65 photos)Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41074-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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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