A sweeping, revelatory dual biography.
Two icons and their turbulent times.
Contemporaries growing up in Weimar Berlin, Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) and Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) both aspired to careers in entertainment: Dietrich as a concert violinist, Riefenstahl as a dancer. In her engrossing, richly detailed debut book, Wieland, a historian of political theory at the Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Culture, offers parallel biographies of the two women, tracing their vastly divergent trajectories. Riefenstahl championed Nazis and exalted Hitler, while Dietrich left Germany for Hollywood stardom. When her future as a violinist was thwarted by tendinitis, Dietrich turned to acting, where her discipline and drive overcame her “modest gifts.” “I had no special talent and I knew it. Everyone knew it,” she confessed. Nevertheless, when Josef von Sternberg saw her in a revue, he decided he had found the star of his new project, The Blue Angel (1930). She would play Lola Lola, “a sassy, savvy, honky-tonk B-girl,” a role that launched her career. Wieland documents her affair with von Sternberg and her many subsequent lovers, including Erich Maria Remarque, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Jean Gabin, American Army Gen. James M. Gavin, Yul Brynner, Fritz Lang, and John F. Kennedy. She also had an intense, though platonic, friendship with Ernest Hemingway. A beloved entertainer of American troops, Dietrich later reinvented herself as a nightclub singer, but her career spiraled downward, and she often was beset by financial worries. Riefenstahl also diverted from dancing to acting, using her training in gymnastics and boxing for roles in mountain films, popular in prewar Germany. By the 1930s, she was not only acting, but producing, directing, and writing screenplays. Hitler, she learned, was a fan “and an anti-capitalist feminist to boot.” She was entranced. Egotistical and self-promoting but nevertheless talented, Riefenstahl won accolades in Germany; managed to be acquitted of Nazi collaboration; and reinvented herself as a photographer. Wieland deftly traces both lives through their many ups and downs.
A sweeping, revelatory dual biography.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-87140-336-0
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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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