An engrossing chronicle of Garbo's sexual friendships with Mercedes de Acosta and Cecil Beaton, based on letters, journals, and personal interviews. Vickers (Vivien Leigh, 1989, etc.) has had access to the personal papers of all three of his subjects; consequently, his story is well-substantiated, largely free of the baseless conjecture that mars so many celebrity biographies. Screenwriter and playwright de Acosta seems to have been a sort of Pamela des Barres of the early screen set: She had serious affairs with Marlene Dietrich, Ona Munson, and numerous other actresses, though Garbo was the great love of her life. After their off-and-on affair ended in the 1930s, though, Garbo was clearly less interested in keeping up the friendship and, indeed, frequently refused to acknowledge de Acosta at all. Cecil Beaton had a 30-year friendship with Garbo that was sometimes platonic, sometimes passionately sexual, and, like Garbo's relationship with de Acosta, often terribly one-sided. Beaton was obsessed with Garbo and wanted to marry her; at certain points in their acquaintance, he would write to her every day, and she would go months without deigning to reply. Garbo remains a bit remote throughout this narrative, partly because, as in most love stories, the more passionate characters are better developed and partly because Vickers must paraphrase Garbo's letters (he was, in many cases, not allowed to quote them directly). Being Beaton's literary executor, Vickers sometimes relies too heavily on the photographer's papers to provide a full account of either de Acosta or Garbo. Beaton is often quoted for pages at a time, uninterrupted by authorial interpretation or a conflicting version of events; his voice and perspective tend to dominate the book. Classy, well-documented gossip, though hardly the balanced portrait of three people that the subtitle suggests. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41301-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
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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