A light, lively narrative about a singular, narcissistic woman.
A biography of a seductress, gold digger, and Nazi collaborator.
As Ronald (Hitler’s Art Thief: Hildebrand Gurlitt, the Nazis, and the Looting of Europe’s Treasures, 2015, etc.) repeatedly asserts, Florence Gould (1895-1983) was “an unmitigated snob and egotist” whose only goal in life was “having a good time in high society.” Born in America to French parents, Gould had aspirations to become a world-famous opera singer; when her talent did not measure up to her outsized self-assessment, she became a chorus girl. After divorcing her wealthy first husband, she caught the eye of Frank Gould, the alcoholic son of railroad magnate Jay Gould, whom she wrested away from his second wife. Frank provided her with jewels and a string of hotels and casinos in French resorts. He also had a predisposition to collecting his own coterie of mistresses while she thrived in the company of “pretty boys” and lovers, including the besotted Charlie Chaplin. Gould’s “beauty, charm, and fabulous wealth had become a deadly man magnet,” Ronald writes. She had a reputation “as a lioness, devouring the men she wanted at will.” Drawing on many published sources, newspaper reports of Gould’s scandalous escapades, and Gould’s often fraudulent testimony when she was interrogated as a Nazi collaborator, Ronald conveys the glittering surface of Gould’s life. Without intimate correspondence or diaries, however, she fails to uncover her subject’s feelings, motivations, and thoughts, resulting in a one-dimensional portrait of an astonishingly selfish woman. Chronicling her many affairs and swirling social life, Ronald homes in on Gould’s liaison with Ludwig Vogel, a former German Luftwaffe officer, who became her lover and protector during the Nazi occupation of France, one of “a dizzying, revolving door of German men.” Vogel, though, was the most important, keeping Gould supplied with all manner of “delectable treats” while most Parisians were nearly starving. Although doggedly investigated after the war, not least for her part in a money-laundering scheme, Gould suffered no reprisals, devoting herself to art, music, and pleasure.
A light, lively narrative about a singular, narcissistic woman.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-09221-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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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