A lively—and often sordid—Hollywood history.
A history that shows clearly how powerful men exploited actresses long before the #MeToo movement began.
Hollywood historian Longworth (Hollywood Frame by Frame: The Unseen Silver Screen in Contact Sheets, 1951-1997, 2014, etc.) has mined memoirs, biographies, magazines, newspapers, and archives to create an entertaining, gossip-filled portrait of the film capital’s golden age, from the 1920s through the 1960s. Central to the story is the enormously wealthy, paranoid, and erratic Howard Hughes (1905-1976), businessman and aviator, whose self-proclaimed goal was “to become the world’s most famous motion picture producer” and whose leering desire for buxom young actresses represented the proclivities of many other men in the industry. These were women “whose faces and bodies Hughes strove to possess and/or make iconic, sometimes at an expense to their minds and souls.” They were harassed, abused, surveilled, and, in some cases, imprisoned by a man with the money and power to make or break their careers. Hughes, writes the author, “was not the only mogul in Hollywood who profited off treating actresses as sex goddess flavors of the month, good for consumption in a brief window but disposable as soon as the next variety came along,” but he acted “more crudely, and with even less of a regard for the person these actresses were before they came into his life.” Those actresses range from the barely remembered (Billie Dove, Faith Domergue) to major stars: Jean Harlow, Katharine Hepburn (who shared Hughes’ home for a while), Bette Davis, Ida Lupino (whose directing career Hughes supported), Ginger Rogers, Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, and Jean Peters (whom Hughes, uncharacteristically, married). Hughes was so famous that he could lure women merely by promising them future stardom: Choosing a young woman’s photo from a newspaper or magazine, he sent a team of men to track her down, have his own photographer take new pictures, and, if he was pleased, invite her to Hollywood—and took control of her life. The media, dazzled by his self-created myth, perpetuated his image as an iconoclastic folk hero.
A lively—and often sordid—Hollywood history.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-244051-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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