A dull account of a largely forgotten American icon.
One of the first media superstars receives an uninspiring biography.
The Fosters (The Secret Lives of Alexandra David-Neel: A Biography of the Explorer of Tibet and Its Forbidden Practices, 1997, etc.) chart the life and career of Adah Isaacs Menken (1835–68), an actress and poet who briefly captivated the world in with her iconic turn in the play Mazeppa, in which she played a male Cossack and, in a sensational set piece, rode a horse up the side of a four-story artificial mountain, clad in not much more than a pair of pink tights. The danger and provocative sexuality attending this stunt cemented Menken’s status as a “dangerous woman” and media superstar, but contemporary scholars are more interested in pinning down the actress’s vague ethnicity and identity politics—she has been variously identified as a woman of color, a Jew and a lesbian (or at the very least bisexual). The authors enthusiastically explore these possibilities, but a crippling dearth of verifiable evidence reduces their sleuthing to a convoluted series of educated guesses. What is certain is Menken’s status as a proto–sex symbol and feminist touchpoint. Her multiple husbands included famous boxer John Heenan and Alexander Menken, a Jewish musician—this union would lead to Menken’s conversion to Judaism and her stridently pro-Jewish poetry. The Fosters praise Menken’s writing profusely, but the work excerpted here is didactic and shrill. She did enjoy many high-profile literary friendships, including relationships with Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and Alexandre Dumas, but the Fosters fail to establish their heroine as a significant artist in her own right. Her lasting contributions boil down to a series of slightly hysterical poems, a starring role in a crowd-pleasing spectacle and some racy photographs. More troubling, Menken, who must have cut a charismatic figure, fails to come to life in the Foster’s pedestrian prose. The authors exhort the reader to appreciate Menken’s singular nature, but she remains an enigma, and the catalog of her lovers, confidants, enemies, professional reversals and emotional crises becomes a tedious litany of woe.
A dull account of a largely forgotten American icon.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59921-602-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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