Refreshingly, Stadiem mostly avoids making the narrative overly gossipy, and it’s good fun to see what devils some of our...
An eye-opening biography of “the elegant French Queen of Sex.”
As she reflected on her legendary career, Madame Claude (1923-2015) opened up to screenwriter and biographer Stadiem (Jet Set: The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years, 2014, etc.) about her life. The author opens with the tale of her arranging one of her “swans” to meet with President John F. Kennedy during his time in Paris. Beginning in 1957, Madame developed an entirely new outlook on the sex industry. Her requirements were simple and rigid: Her girls, never to be called prostitutes, had to be beautiful, tall, intelligent, and good in bed. They were the cover girls next door, mostly from the upper classes. Madame sent them for teeth straightening, plastic surgery, and lessons in diction, dance, music, and even skiing. When they were perfect, they would earn more than enough to repay Madame, or they would find a husband to pay off the sizable debt incurred. She knew enough to deal only with wealthy customers, and she charged accordingly, taking a 30 percent commission. She never had a problem recruiting swans; they came to her. Their motivation at first was cash-based. Eventually, as the author shows, she developed her brand, and girls flocked to her, submitting to her candid, sometimes-vicious appraisals. At the beginning of her career, two developments created her market: the telephone and the jet set crowd. The oil embargo of the 1970s brought oil-based wealth. Her contacts included sheiks, movie stars, nobility, and heads of state. Her business flourished tax free, but she was careful in her dealings. Charles de Gaulle’s government, as well as those that followed, artfully ignored her business, and she even met weekly with the police and shared intelligence. She never entertained, socialized, or allowed drugs; she just connected rich men with their fantasies.
Refreshingly, Stadiem mostly avoids making the narrative overly gossipy, and it’s good fun to see what devils some of our political and cultural heroes really were.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12238-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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