Like a five-and-dime store, this perfunctory biography of French leading lady Moreau lays everything out, but nothing is particularly valuable. Moreau, along with Catherine Deneuve and Brigitte Bardot, was one of a trio of French actresses/femme fatales who achieved international stardom in the 1960s and helped revitalize French cinema. Sexy, intelligent, effortlessly talented, she worked with some of the world's greatest directors, from Orson Welles to Franáois Truffaut to Louis Malle, and some of her films, such as Jules and Jim and Chimes at Midnight, have become celebrated classics. She also made a huge number of duds and was relentlessly typecast as a prostitute or seductress. As with many actresses, time has not been kind to her. Every year the roles have grown fewer and less involving, and so the woman who gave a powerful, groundbreaking portrait of female sexuality in The Lovers was, 25 years later, reduced to playing raunchy grandmothers. In Gray (Depardieu, not reviewed), Moreau has a sympathetic but overly tactful biographer. Gray's extensive interviews with her subject seem to have produced a kind of biographical Stockholm Syndrome, causing her to gloss over or finesse subjects Moreau finds distasteful: ``Her son, JÇrìme, who has always been kept in the background, is a forbidden subject.'' And so we hear almost no more about JÇrìme. Even Moreau's high-flying affairs with everyone from the usually homosexual Pierre Cardin to Marcello Mastroianni are handled with too much reticence. Gray also tends to a breezy passivity, a reluctance to do the necessary spadework of research; e.g., she freely admits that she has only seen two-thirds of Moreau's films. Gray has certain narrative gifts, but this is simply not a thorough biography. (16 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: April 15, 1996
ISBN: 1-55611-487-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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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