Here’s a blockbuster romance waiting to be filmed: Beautiful, gifted Italian immigrant turns Soviet spy and is loved by Edward Weston, befriended by Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo, and, after her mysterious death, mourned by Pablo Neruda. According to Italian writer and journalist Cacucci, Modotti came to the US from Italy in 1913. She was 17, strikingly attractive, and enigmatically compelling to the poet/painter whom she soon married and followed to Los Angeles. Her voluptuous figure gained her femme fatale Hollywood roles, but she abandoned cinema in favor of an intense affair with photographer Weston, who introduced her to the still camera. Modotti and Weston headed for Mexico City, where Tina involved herself in the postrevolutionary artistic and political ferment. In their circle were artists Rivera, Xavier Guerrero, David Siqueiros, and others who influenced her politics and her work. Increasingly sure-footed in her photographs of street life, she “opened the door to social documentary,” according to the author. Nevertheless, her hard-line Communist stance forced her to flee Mexico for Moscow. Giving up photography, Modotti alternated Politburo duties with political espionage, landing in Spain during the Civil War. Reassigned to the US, she was deported to Mexico, where she backed off from the Communist Party, disillusioned by the Hitler/Stalin pact and the first assassination attempt on Trotsky (then in Mexico). She died in 1943 in a taxi, en route home from a dinner party. Was it suicide or assassination? No sure answer. This biography was published in Italy in 1991 and has been translated somewhat stiffly into English by Duncan . More troubling than the stops and starts of the translation are the intermittent “you-are-there” dialogues—between, for instance, Modotti and a Mexican prosecutor, and Modotti and lover Julio Mello. Who was present to record these conversations? A life of mystery, passion, dedication, and talent that begs, “Tell us more.” (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 23, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20036-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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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