Despite its overreach, this is an ambitious portrait of a young actress whose best films are still ahead of her—a first...
The toughest broad in Hollywood gets the Robert Caro treatment.
It’s perhaps beside the point to say that Knopf vice president and senior editor Wilson’s massive biography of Barbara Stanwyck (1907–1990) makes too much of its subject. The first of two volumes, it weighs in at more than 1,000 pages and only takes the subject up to the age of 33. This first installment is as much about the legendary actress’s life as her times: the lavish world of Hollywood as well as the Depression-era reality of people who flocked to see their favorite stars. By placing Stanwyck in this larger context, Wilson seems to be suggesting that she was a key figure of the 20th century, which is, at the least, a bit of a stretch. However, Wilson provides a very real sense of Hollywood as experienced from the inside. Born Ruby Stevens and orphaned at an early age, Stanwyck emerges here as every bit the scrapper she played on screen, an all-consuming whirlwind whose co-stars would be so awestruck that they would often forget their own lines. She wasn’t necessarily the classic beauty; she was the sexy gal who said, “Now get out!” In married life, her toughness varied. She loyally suffered at the hands of her mentor, Frank Fay; on the rebound, she both nurtured and dominated Robert Taylor. While Wilson can lay on the research a bit thick—no salary or household expense gets past her—she deeply scrutinizes every Stanwyck performance up to 1940, letting us see the actress work and, in some key roles—e.g., The Miracle Woman, The Bitter Tea of General Yen and Stella Dallas—really sweat. The author also includes an extensive, mostly helpful series of appendices comprising stage, film, radio and TV chronologies.
Despite its overreach, this is an ambitious portrait of a young actress whose best films are still ahead of her—a first volume that should whet readers’ appetite for the second, provided they have the stamina to stay with it.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-684-83168-8
Page Count: 1056
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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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