Zeitz does create a picture of a United States undergoing a sexual revolution and experiencing urbanization, an expanding...
If the United States became modern in the decade after the First World War, a popular symbol of that modernity is the flapper, a scantily clad, frivolous young woman whose newfound freedom from restrictive clothing represented a way of life free of Victorian social strictures.
Zeitz (American History/Cambridge Univ.), a contributing editor to American Heritage magazine, has undertaken to chronicle the rise and fall of this icon of modernity through the lives of those who exemplified her and those who promoted her. The author devotes considerable space to the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who is variously credited with inventing her, discovering her and/or exploiting her, as well as to that of his wife Zelda. Also sketched in considerable detail are the lives of the women who portrayed her on the silver screen—Colleen Moore, Clara Bow and Louise Brooks—those who wrote about her—New Yorker columnist Lois Long, among them—and those who drew her—fashion artist Gordon Conway and cartoonist John Held. Also profiled are the fashion designer Coco Chanel, whose designs defined her slender silhouette, and Bruce Barton and Edward Bernays, who used her image to promote the sale of consumer goods. The result is a work that feels unduly padded, stuffed full of extraneous facts. These certainly provide color, but it is not clear what Hemingway’s jealousy of Fitzgerald, the fact that Louise Brooks claimed to have slept with Greta Garbo or that Lois Long typed her columns stripped to her slip have to do with the subject.
Zeitz does create a picture of a United States undergoing a sexual revolution and experiencing urbanization, an expanding consumer culture and a booming economy, but he burdens it with an excess of irrelevant particulars.Pub Date: March 14, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-8053-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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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