A nostalgic recollection of the great beauty's movies and memories.
The award-winning actress and international sex symbol tells her life story, from her childhood in Naples, Italy, to her rise to the top of the Hollywood A-list.
In this occasionally revealing memoir, Loren (Sophia Loren's Recipes and Memories, 1998, etc.) opens her "treasure trove of memories.” She is amusing and engaging when discussing her teenage ambition to be a star. She participated in beauty pageants (in one, she earned a "Miss Eleganza" sash) and became a popular model in Italian "photo-romance" novels before beginning her career as a movie actress. However, when she chronicles her relationship with Italian film producer Carlo Ponti—who brought her to the United States and helped make her an international star—Loren’s directness evaporates and the narrative falters. She describes Ponti as "a determined businessman" and an “authoritative gentleman,” but she gives only glancing acknowledgement of his wife and two small children—not to mention the fact that he was 39 and she was only 17 when their affair began. (To modern ears, the charges Ponti's family later brought against the couple for "bigamy and concubinage" will seem archaic.) Along with her blithe dismissal of inconvenient facts, Loren repeatedly describes herself as a shy woman of high moral character; as proof, she haughtily reveals the story behind the infamous photo of her staring at Jayne Mansfield's deep neckline at a Hollywood party in 1957—Loren claims she was scandalized and "terrified" because "one of her breasts [was] in my plate.” Throughout, Loren earnestly tells her many stories in the sentimental and often amused voice of "Nonna Sofia,” though without much scrutiny or a sharp wit. A short appendix lists each of the author’s acting roles by year.
A nostalgic recollection of the great beauty's movies and memories.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1476797427
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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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