MGM with lots of pulp. (Eight pages of photos)
Slipshod biographies of the men who roared at MGM.
Given that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was one of the most successful and influential film studios during Hollywood’s golden age, a take on its leading male stars is entirely in order. As actors, just how great were Tracy and Gable? What sort of masculinity emanated from two of the studio’s biggest stars, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly? Look for little insight here into those or other related topics. Wayne (The Golden Girls of MGM, 2003, etc.), who has penned nine other Hollywood bios, reveals her slant early on. Interviewing the famous, she writes in her preface, is “a waste of time.” The “unknown starlets” bent on revenge are much more reliable, while prostitutes who serviced the stars are even better sources, especially on their clients’ penis sizes. Thus, Wayne reveals that some stars (Frank Sinatra, for example) were bigger than others (Gable, alas). Overall, it seems, Wayne spends perhaps more time in her subjects’ bedrooms than she does on the sets of their pictures. She reports, for instance, that Spencer Tracy sometimes suffered impotence, Robert Taylor was rumored to be bisexual, and Van Johnson was presumed by some actors to be gay. As for the films these MGM Boys (as they were called) starred in, the author seldom has more than a word or a phrase for them: Sea of Grass, she writes, was “a miserable picture,” and so on. Tossing off more clichés than there are in a shelf of romance novels, and leaning heavily on previously published accounts, Wayne goes on to rehash the tired details of the men’s lives. Peter Lawford ran interference when John F. Kennedy had sex with Marilyn Monroe. Frank Sinatra was hopelessly besotted by Ava Gardner. Clark Gable broke into pictures by having sex with openly gay actor William Haines. Frankly, though, few will give a damn.
MGM with lots of pulp. (Eight pages of photos)Pub Date: March 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1475-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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