The nanny's-eye view of the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow meltdown. Groteke was a college student when hired in the summer of 1991 to help care for the younger of Farrow's children (there were nine at the time—two more were adopted during her tenure). She worked for the family during the turbulent two years that followed, when Farrow discovered Allen's affair with her daughter Soon-Yi and later accused him of molesting their seven-year-old, Dylan. Groteke is a member of Farrow's camp, but she doesn't mince words: Her depiction of the actress is not flattering. More compelling than her rehashings of the by-now familiar accusations and counteraccusations are her cannily framed snapshots of daily life in the Farrow household. Allen was often icy (he ignored most of the children) but could turn on practically irresistible charm. Farrow was part child-saving saint, part ``doormat.'' After the Soon-Yi discovery, she continued to talk on the phone to Allen as often as ten times a day, made her older children her confidants as she publicly nursed her ``broken heart,'' and contemplated taking in more children. While Groteke says she hasn't ``the foggiest idea'' of whether the molestation occurred, she highlights changes in Dylan's behavior (i.e., heightened physical modesty) that took place at the time. Farrow meanwhile vacillated between obsessive crusading and a state of depression and fear verging on paranoia (she was convinced, for instance, that her apartment was bugged). But as time passed, she regained strength and equanimity. Groteke (assisted by People magazine writer Rosen) delivers the goods: loads of telling details of a family at once genuinely loving and severely troubled. Followers of this most lurid of family feuds will find Groteke a rare source: a spankingly sensible insider whose allegiances don't seem to circumscribe what she reports.
Pub Date: May 16, 1994
ISBN: 0-7867-0066-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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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