Only for fans of a golden era of Hollywood stardom, as long as they’re not looking for much gossip or personal revelation.
The author makes her case that Myrna Loy (1905–1993) could inspire a fascinating biography, but she doesn’t really deliver one.
Though Loy was once one of Hollywood’s leading female stars, Leider (Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino, 2003, etc.) maintains that she was underappreciated, partly because of the subtlety of her craft. She was too much the complementary role player—most memorably as Nora to William Powell’s Nick Charles in The Thin Man and sequels—rarely the spotlight diva whose dark passions might pique the curiosity of the public. In this comprehensive and cliché-ridden biography, the author shows that irony, complexity and contradiction provided tension between Loy’s public image(s) and her private life. Initially known for the exotic features that inspired the Asian screen surname that the former Myrna Williams adopted, she was in fact an all-American, freckle-faced ranch girl from Montana. Later dubbed “the Perfect Wife” for the roles for which she was typecast, she had four broken marriages to men who were unfaithful to her and/or unsuitable for her. She was even the target of some McCarthy-era red-baiting, though the lifelong liberal Democrat was an outspoken anti-communist. Other than Loy’s autobiography, written toward the end of her long life, this is the first biography of the actress, and it draws heavily from Loy’s book. Leider offers a summary of every career step and (it seems) every one of the “staggering 124 films” she made. Yet either there wasn’t much psychological depth to Loy, or Leider was unable or unwilling to probe it. For all of the encyclopedic detail devoted to the life, the book mainly illuminates the art of “an enormously subtle actress, whose minimalism belied her mysterious powerhouse capabilities.” Such subtlety accounts for the fact that even when the Oscars paid considerable attention to her hits such as The Thin Man and The Best Years of Our Lives, they didn’t even bestow nominations on Loy.
Only for fans of a golden era of Hollywood stardom, as long as they’re not looking for much gossip or personal revelation.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-520-25320-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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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