A rehash of the life of Jackie as she turns 65: a collection of old news, non-news, and tabloid analysis. Kennedy chronicler David (Good Ted, Bad Ted: The Two Faces of Edward M. Kennedy, 1993) takes us on a walking tour of Jackie's Manhattan. Did you know, for example, that Jackie jogs clockwise around the Central Park reservoir instead of counterclockwise like the other runners (to avoid photographers on her route)? Or that she buys her sweatpants at the Gap at 86th and Madison? Although Jackie had a facelift in 1979, her hands have prominent veins and ``brown and yellow blotches of varying sizes.'' It can't be any fun churning out copy about a subject who does not give interviews. David has spent valuable time in the library and has interviewed colleagues, servants, tradespeople, and Kennedy relatives to get even the smell of a scoop, but his pickings are slim. This is a textbook on how to make short, impersonal interviews seem like page-one stories. As if we were reading a Christmas letter, we learn that Mrs. Onassis exercises regularly, gets plenty of sleep, and eats healthfully. Her newest roommate is chubby, married diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman. She still doesn't get along with the other Kennedy women (``They were clam chowder, she was lobster bisque''), and she vacations on Martha's Vineyard, where she had a disagreement with the Wampanoag Indians. (Apparently, Wampanoag chief Moshup and his wife, Old Squant, are buried on her private beach.) Regrettably she has been diagnosed with lymphoma, but the prognosis is optimistic. The children and grandchildren are healthy, and John John is no longer dating Madonna. To be read under the hair dryer, but not really thrilling enough to take home. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (First printing of 50,000; first serial to New Woman)
Pub Date: July 28, 1994
ISBN: 1-55972-234-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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