Devotion to genius characterizes the life of Eugene O—Neill’s daughter and Charlie Chaplin’s wife in this respectful overview. Drawing on extensive research, arts journalist Scovell (who has been co-author to Elizabeth Taylor and Kitty Dukakis) moves quickly from the proverbial family tree to chart the messier human trail left by mother Agnes Boulton O’Neill’s flightiness and father Eugene’s nearly lifelong absence and rejection of their daughter. Aside from a vivid fit of despair, Oona’s youthful feelings are not deeply documented here. But her early actions are, as a beautiful New York society girl, Hollywood ingenue, and, at age 18, fourth wife to 54-year-old Chaplin. Though Scovell draws the requisite links between father O’Neill’s neglect and Oona’s need for Chaplin’s adoration, the author doesn—t dwell on them. She speculates that the mutual protection offered by the marriage somewhat diminished and compromised the couple’s awareness of the world; Gold Rush co-star Georgia Hale even questions their union’s perfection. But Scovell, like Oona’s friends and family, largely accepts the idea that when a marriage lasts for four decades and produces eight children, one should stop seeking its flaws and instead celebrate its duration. As for whether Oona ever wanted more for herself, Scovell’s as clear as her research allows. She notes that Oona may have screamed, in her last days, “What the f— did I do with my life!” but that she never sought artistic parity with Chaplin (and rejected invitations to write a memoir). Hardly a story of marital victimization, this tells instead of how Oona made a choice, lived her life afterward, and in Chaplin probably found exactly what she wanted: “father, lover, provider and protector.” Only upon his death did her drinking grow debilitating. Nevertheless, her dependent position and habitual self-effacement inevitably make Oona, however finely realized, a limited subject for a biography. A semi-hidden life of unbroken allegiance, compassionately rendered. (16 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 4, 1998
ISBN: 0-446-51730-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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