What lay beneath the compulsions? Leigh never gets beyond the surface of Kelly’s need to please a distant, philandering...
Gossipy biography of Her Serene Highness.
Setting to work on a biography of Grace Kelly, Leigh (The Secret Letters of Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy, 2003, etc.) was advised by her editor, “I don’t want anything warmed over.” By that criterion, her results are decidedly mixed. In broad outline, Leigh’s version offers little that departs from the themes of nine other Kelly biographies and several books that consider her in passing. Here again we see Kelly obsessed with becoming a star. “She was,” a friend recalls, “like a Patton tank on her way to somewhere.” Kelly threatened to break a long-term contract at MGM if the studio refused to loan her to Paramount to play a plum role in The Country Girl. Metro relented and Kelly copped an Oscar for her performance. Leigh also follows other biographers to the bedrooms where Kelly walked in, stripped naked, then pursued an affair, often with a considerably older co-star (Gary Cooper, William Holden, Frank Sinatra, et al.). Kelly’s storybook marriage to Prince Rainier had scant effect on her promiscuity. The union, which sprang from a public-relations move to polish Monaco’s faded image, soon left Princess Grace lonely; she diverted herself, as her husband did, with affairs. Leigh does bring a fresh perspective to Kelly’s acting, especially in a favorable critique of Kelly’s underrated work in High Noon. To a narrative highlighting sleeping arrangements, Leigh adds to what has already been reported about Kelly’s prodigious sex life the news that she slept with Tony Curtis. The author also devotes an entire chapter to the question of whether Kelly’s affair with David Niven was short- or long-term.
What lay beneath the compulsions? Leigh never gets beyond the surface of Kelly’s need to please a distant, philandering father.Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-34236-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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