Enough already.
Slapdash account that adds a few grains of new information to the Monroe file with transcripts of tapes the actress made for her psychiatrist.
Boasting the dubious distinction of participation in both the Monroe and the Kennedy industries (The Men Who Murdered Marilyn, 1997; Vendetta: The Kennedys, 1993, etc.), Smith obviously has no problem with beating a dead horse. The tape transcripts run for just a few pages and reveal little of significance, and before even turning to those monologues the author devotes half his narrative to rehashing the details of Monroe’s death. Agatha Christie herself would have been challenged to connect the dots of the evidence at the scene. Jars of pills by the bedside first stood empty, then filled. The bedroom first looked neat and orderly, then chaotic, with papers strewn about. A washing machine hummed in the background—someone washing away evidence, perhaps? Smith does not believe her psychiatrist and the Kennedys killed Monroe, as others have claimed. Instead, he suggests the culprits were CIA operatives eager to topple a political dynasty by setting up the star’s death as a Kennedy plot. The idea seems plausible, though Smith builds his thesis on a stack of ifs, maybes, and might-have-beens. As for Monroe’s tapes, they cover such unedifying topics as taking enemas and having sex with Joan Crawford, plus a few predictable comments about working with Laurence Olivier (“a great, great actor”) and the peculiar remark—perhaps Monroe was just being funny—that the Bible is “a good script.” The repetitious, disorganized text contains glaring factual errors (Garson Kanin, not George Cukor, directed My Favorite Wife; Judy Garland was a young teen in the 1930s, not the 1950s) and enough grammatical howlers to give an English teacher a migraine.
Enough already.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1380-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
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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