Actress Strasberg's second tour of her friendship with Marilyn Monroe—first told in her confessional 1980 autobiography, Bittersweet, which focused on Strasberg's emotional swamps—is an even stronger, more mature version of her time spent with the legend. This memoir in no way deepens our grasp of what or who MM was, nor does it match Arthur Miller's magnificent portrait in Timebands. Miller, in fact, gets mauled by Strasberg, who shows him at his most tight-lipped and beleaguered, especially after his cuckolding by Yves Montand and during the filming of The Misfits. What makes Strasberg's Marilyn rewarding might be called the ``bodywarmth'' of MM's presence on the page. Marilyn comes through as a luminescent older sister and jealous rival for Strasberg's parents' attention. Lee Strasberg was the nation's high guru of acting, to whom Marilyn fled when she could not get out of her dumb-blond roles. Could Lee make her a serious actress? Indeed, Lee could, and certainly gave something to MM's intellectual growth, confidence, and ability to stretch as an actress. Her private rehearsals with Lee in the Strasberg apartment are always offstage here, with young Susan eavesdropping when her mother Paula doesn't have her ear to the door. Marilyn at 29 became a regular houseguest for years (Susan was then 17, though she'd met MM much earlier on the set of There's No Business Like Show Business), and the monolithic Lee had a soft spot for her that melted his usual granite. Susan and MM rolled around her bedroom like sisters, trying out Kama Sutra positions (clothed), and MM lusted for Susan's clothes while Susan yearned to be MM. Much later, a grief- stricken Lee wrote and delivered MM's eulogy. Can we ever get enough of MM? Maybe not. Strasberg allows us once more chance to cuddle up to a shy goddess. But MM fans also shouldn't miss Sam Toperoff's adventurous, literate novel Queen of Desire (1991). (Sixteen pages of photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: April 10, 1992
ISBN: 0-446-51592-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
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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