More breathless than breathtaking.
The Italian actress, her supporting cast, and hundreds of extras populate this diffuse biography.
When Eleonora Duse died at age 65 during a US tour in 1924, more than 20,000 adoring fans lined the streets of Manhattan, throwing roses and carnations at the cortege bearing her corpse. What made Duse a legend? Why did her performances literally bring John Barrymore to his knees? Why did acting guru Lee Strasberg proclaim it would take 100 years to comprehend her technique? The answers are scattered through a myriad of detail that Sheehy (Eva Le Gallienne, 1996, etc.) culled from letters, press accounts, and other histories during her prodigious research. But the text never fully conveys the impact of Duse’s acting, perhaps because the author seems to have no overarching theme. Sheehy stints on the theater-shaking confluence of Duse’s talent with Ibsen’s plays, spending far too much time instead with walk-ons in the actress’s biography. (Need one know, for example, that Count Giuseppe Primoli, who appears in passing, was known as “GeGe” to his friends?) The treatment of Duse’s personal life is more evocative, but distasteful: the actress comes across as tiresome, manipulative, and melodramatic. She had a distant relationship with her daughter, who was shipped off to boarding schools so the diva could perform. Duse haughtily refused to talk to most reporters, yet shrewdly cultivated friendships with publishers and writers who might provide favorable coverage or write plays for her. Her remarks often sound like lines from bad plays. At 36, she told a friend, “I’m in the summer . . . and summer is so close to autumn and that is the end.” It’s not surprising to learn that Duse felt her acting brought her closer to reality than did her life, which she regarded as a fiction.
More breathless than breathtaking.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-40017-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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
PERSPECTIVES
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