Will appeal to film buffs and readers interested in the rise and burnout of long-ago Hollywood stars.
An extensively researched look at the life of silent-movie star Mae Murray (1885–1965).
Ankerich (Broken Silence: Conversations with 23 Silent Film Stars, 2011, etc.) structures this biography chronologically, beginning with Murray's birth to poor German immigrants in New York City's Lower East Side. As an adult, Murray offered little to no factual details about her childhood, shrouding "her own birth date and her early years in a veil of secrecy." Early on, she lost her father to alcohol-related complications; before she was 18, she cut off all contact with her mother and her brothers, one of whom showed up years later demanding money and threatening to reveal Murray's sordid family story to the press if she didn't pay up. Passionate about dancing, the teenage Murray lingered around stage doors and got her start in theater, dancing and singing. Ankerich tracks Murray’s multiple failed marriages and her lucrative career in Hollywood, including the dramatic back stories of such films as The Merry Widow. Her penchant for hiding the truth about her life revealed itself yet again when she secretly gave birth to a son in 1926. Five months later, despite her love for the man she described as her "soul mate," Rudy Valentino, Murray wed David Mdivani, an aspiring filmmaker who falsely identified himself as a Georgian prince. Shortly thereafter, Valentino died, leaving Murray devastated. Her marriage to Mdivani unraveled with endless fighting and a custody dispute as Murray struggled with financial problems that would plague her for the rest of her life. In 1965, she died of a stroke. Ankerich's studied biography leaves no stone unturned, and he integrates hundreds of quotations and sources, grounding Murray's life with fascinating facts.
Will appeal to film buffs and readers interested in the rise and burnout of long-ago Hollywood stars.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8131-3690-5
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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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