Marilyn's love life, or sex life, following in the trashy tradition of Wayne's Ava's Men, Grace Kelly's Men, Crawford's Men, etc. This is a book that should have been printed on bedsheet linen instead of paper. As ever, Wayne focuses on the men Marilyn knew, loved, and/or married on the Hollywood carousel, starting with Marilyn's stories of child abuse and rape—although her first husband, Jim Dougherty, whom she married at 16 to avoid being returned to an orphanage, swore she was a virgin in the bridal bed. Marilyn had several versions of premarital sex. Wayne adds as topping: ``Yet another version is that she became pregnant at fourteen and put the baby boy up for adoption when it was a few days old, but this is untrue.'' Dougherty ships out with the Merchant Marine, and Marilyn, working in a defense plant, is discovered by photographer David Conover. Soon, she's the cover girl for Laff, Peek and See, U.S. Camera, and dozens of other mags, and then is servicing impotent, elderly Joe Schenck of 20th Century-Fox, falling in love with older vocal-coach Freddy Karger, and caught up in dozens of illicit affairs. Wayne posits Monroe's abortions—not counting miscarriages—at 13 or 14, tells of her early days as a bar girl, suggests that she never had an orgasm despite the attentions of sophisticated lovers such as Orson Welles, Yves Montand, Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Brando, Sinatra, and others. The author recycles endlessly, pastes together familiar materials about Marilyn's last days and the possibility that she died in a hospital, then was returned to her bed, etc., but this second-, third-, fourth- or fifth-hand account carries almost no weight. Stick with Arthur Miller's Timebends. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: Aug. 20, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-07633-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
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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