Fawning biography of a not particularly complicated celebrity, containing few surprises and little insight.
Celebrity biographer Russell (Arise Sir Tom Jones, 2007, etc.) chooses as her latest subject the phenomenally popular soccer star.
Beckham isn’t merely a very skilled athlete, she suggests, but an icon deserving a knighthood. This is a difficult claim to make since he doesn’t come across as unusually culturally or socially active. In chronological fashion, Russell recounts Beckham’s already well-known history: childhood soccer prodigy, Manchester United star, romance with wife Victoria (aka Posh Spice), move to Real Madrid and finally a quarter-billion-dollar contract with the Los Angeles Galaxy. Along the way, the author works hard to demonstrate that Beckham is deeper than the average celebrity. She points out that, although he works in the hyper-macho world of competitive sports, he enjoys fashion and accepts his status as a sex symbol to gay men. (While unusual among athletes, this isn’t quite on par with Dennis Rodman wearing drag or Billie Jean King defeating Bobby Riggs.) Russell’s effort to paint Beckham as beyond mere celebrity superficialities, however, is undercut by the fact that she goes out of her way to attach a dollar value to just about everything he gets or owns, from salary and cars to homes and jewelry. The biography reads like little more than a puff piece gleaned from dozens of tabloid clippings. It chronicles events familiar to any Beckham fan, including his turbulent relationship with Manchester’s old-school manager, Alex Ferguson, the births of his children and the rumors of infidelity that rocked the perception of Beckham as, in Russell’s hyperbolic words, “the world’s best husband and father.”
Fawning biography of a not particularly complicated celebrity, containing few surprises and little insight.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-84454-416-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: John Blake/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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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