Another go at the story of billionaire heiress Doris Duke that raises more questions than it answers about her life, her death, and her last will and testament. Schwarz (Rose Kennedy: A Life of Faith, Family, and Tragedy, 1995) tries to take a more evenhanded approach to Duke's life story than last year's trashing by her cousin Pony Duke in Too Rich: The Family Secrets of Doris Duke. Coauthor Rybak worked for about two years as Duke's personal chef and was also partly responsible for the hiring of the infamous butler, the late Bernard Lafferty, who supervised—and perhaps helped to hasten- -Duke's death in 1993 at age 80. According to the authors, Duke's father, Buck, was the primary influence in her life, the man who taught Doris to ``trust no one'' and passed on his own obsessions: sex, money, and agriculture. As to sex, Doris's lovers were numerous and varied, from her first husband, the well-bred but financially strapped Jimmy Cromwell, to the jazz pianist Joey Castro. As for money and agriculture, Doris nurtured the Duke fortune from millions to billions and along the way became a botanical expert, specializing in orchids. She was also an accomplished jazz pianist with some recordings to her credit. Although Duke gets recognition for her accomplishments, including her expertise in Eastern art, this biography indulges heavily in speculation about family crimes, including several ``murders.'' Credibility shrinks from sloppy inconsistencies and offensive characterizations, such as the description of Irish immigrants as ``drinking, dancing and brawling.'' The book ends with long, unenlightening excerpts from civil and criminal investigations relating to Duke's death and her will, and peculiar paeans to an attorney representing some Duke employees. An attempt at a fair hearing for the headline heiress that is negated by trivia and hearsay. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 26, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-14583-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
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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