A respectful overview that lets an icon of women's filmmaking emerge as a full-fledged human being, social crusader, and artist. As in My Last Days with Errol Flynn (not reviewed), which he coauthored, Donati uses abundant research to coax readers to a broader understanding of his subject—in this case, to reestablish Lupino's (191895) position as a top film actress and discuss her directorial accomplishments in aesthetic rather than gender-related terms. Born into a generations-old stage family in England, the teenage Lupino was already an experienced actress when summoned to Hollywood in 1933. The big-studio years that follow comprise some of the book's liveliest passages, partly because Lupino's star was on the rise (she earned more than Bogart in High Sierra) and partly because her Hollywood cohorts, particularly the moguls, live up to their stereotypical dazzle. Jack Warner pegged Lupino ``another Bette Davis''; Columbia head Harry Cohn pronounced, ``You are not beautiful, Ida, but you've got a funny little pan.'' Years of acclaim followed (The Hard Way, Pillow to Post), until 1947 when her contract with Warner Bros. was canceled. Over the next decade, she wrote scripts and formed a production company, Filmakers, making movies about social problems others avoided—illegitimacy, rape, polio. For two decades she was a respected film and television director (Hard, Fast and Beautiful, The Hitchhiker), hailed for her economical, fast-paced style. Throughout her life she was known for her professional largesse, giving several people an early break, notably director Sam Peckinpah. While this book enthralls with the glamour of a high-rolling Hollywood life, its restraint is refreshing. Donati treads lightly over common tell-all stomping grounds—three failed marriages, affairs, career decline, estrangement from her only child, Bridget. Ida Dearest will have to be written by someone else. A welcome, gentlemanly work on a lauded yet underappreciated figure. (24 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8131-1895-6
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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