Fascinating mother-daughter symbiosis makes this a Freudian feast.
New York journalist Nathan rescues from oblivion the enigmatic author of a beloved, politically incorrect children's book.
Dare Wright died at age 86 in a state nursing home on Roosevelt Island.That was in 2001—44 years after the publication of The Lonely Doll launched her popular (and exceedingly weird) children’s book series. Born in Canada, Wright was brought up mostly in Cleveland, where her divorced mother Edie tenaciously made a living as a portrait painter. Dare enjoyed a fairly glamorous adult life in Manhattan in the ’50s and ’60s, first as a photographer, fashion model, and actress, then as the author of numerous Edith and the Bears books. Yet the story Nathan doggedly pursues is of the steely umbilical bond between artistically driven, egotistical mother and beautiful, submissive, obedient daughter. Edie and Dare did everything together: they traveled as a pair, collaborated in work, fended off importunate admirers, even slept in the same bed. Their parents’ 1919 divorce traumatized both four-year-old Dare and her seven-year-old brother Blaine, who was sent away to live with his alcoholic father. Only in their late 20s did the siblings finally reunite, spending long vacations together in upstate New York and negotiating prickly truces between son and mother, who vied for Dare’s attention. This sad, triangular drama was enacted for the rest of their lives, as none of the Wrights seemed to need intimacy outside the threesome. Dare’s fetish for her doll, Edith—funny how similar that name is to Mom’s—led her to develop, with Edie’s help, a story in photographs (complete with spanking scenes), which she painstakingly composed like a fashion shoot. Legions of fans cherished The Lonely Doll and subsequent books, though their affection couldn’t ease Dare’s bitter old age, soaked in alcohol following Edie’s and Blaine’s deaths. Nathan’s straightforward account somewhat dryly sticks to the facts, allowing the curious and very lovely photographs that Dare and her mother took of each other over a lifetime to tell much of the story.
Fascinating mother-daughter symbiosis makes this a Freudian feast.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7612-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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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