Warm, richly researched life of dark-haired, limpid-eyed Linda Darnell, who made her first picture at 15 playing an adult and seemingly kept her face-in-the-twilight flawlessness fresh forever. Darnell was the daughter of hard-drinking, part-Cherokee Pearl Brown Darnell, who was set like steel on making her daughter a movie star. Even as a child, Darnell was so forbiddingly beautiful that she seemed set aside by nature and had few friends. Mother had her out singing and dancing all over Dallas andthough the child did neither wellwinning prizes largely on sheer looks. A screen test at 15 eventually landed her the lead in Hotel for Women (1939), and her third picture, Star Dust (1940), was autobiographical, about her discovery by Hollywood. Still in her teens, she played against her idol, Tyrone Power, making some of her best films with him while going to school on the Fox lot. Whether this forced bloom was the cause or not, she never had a menstrual period throughout her life, and felt her beauty was a fraud. Her first husband, a 42-year-old cameraman she married at 19, taught her to knock back whiskey and by her early 20s she was an alcoholic, as tough and hard-swearing as her outrageous mother. Her greatest successes were Forever Amber, A Letter to Three Wives, and Preston Sturgess's original Unfaithfully Yours. Her big love was for Joseph L. Manckiewicz, who wrote and directed her best worka six-year affair, although Joe was married, as was Linda. By 31, she'd been cast aside by Hollywood. She spent her last decade in ever more desperate show- biz turns, went broke, never rose above the bottle battle, died in a housefire at 41 just after watching a midnight rerun of Star Dust on TV. Well done, quite believable, in some ways a model celebrity bio in its method, although the writing is not distinguished and any study of Darnell's acting talentslimited though they wereis scanted.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8061-2327-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
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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