An authoritative and perceptive portrait.
The illustrious career of “a great stage actress in both comedy and tragedy, and an international film star.”
Winner of two Academy Awards, four Golden Globes, and several Emmys, the internationally acclaimed Maggie Smith (b. 1934) is currently best known as Lady Violet on Downton Abbey. As British theater critic and biographer Coveney (Ken Campbell: The Great Caper, 2012, etc.) portrays her in this informative, well-crafted biography, Smith brings to her role as Dowager Countess the acerbic wit, sly irreverence, and masterly technique that have served her throughout her long career. Steeped in theater history, and with full cooperation from Smith; her husband, actor Beverley Cross; family and colleagues, including her close friend Judi Dench, Coveney seamlessly melds Smith’s personal and professional lives into an engrossing narrative. Smith’s stardom was ensured, the author believes, in 1960, when she received 12 curtain calls for her performance in J.M. Barrie’s What Every Woman Knows. In 1969, her role in The Prime of Miss Brodie earned her an Oscar. Besides “her incurably obsessive drive to be working,” Coveney writes, “she had a sure instinct about which work to do.” That work took her to the Stratford Festival in Ontario, London’s West End, Broadway, and Hollywood; from the start, she proved herself an astonishing comedienne. As Michael Caine, her co-star in Neil Simon’s California Suite, remarked, acting with Smith “was like attending a one-woman masterclass on comic technique.” On stage and screen, director Peter Wood said, Smith had a “telepathic ray” that connected with her audience. To co-stars, though, she could seem formidable: Michael Palin commented on “an intensity of animosity sometimes, which comes out in her acting and can be quite chilling.” Journalist Bernard Levin thought she constructed a “brittle facade” to hide her vulnerability. “I’m never shy on the stage,” she said. “Always shy off it.” “I don’t like myself very much,” she once admitted. “I’d much rather be someone else.”
An authoritative and perceptive portrait.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-08148-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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