Grier’s iconic force fails to translate to the page—a disappointment for fans of her unforgettable performances and reign as...
Screen goddess Grier reflects on her life as an Army brat and showbiz icon, to middling effect.
The author recounts her rural, peripatetic childhood, marred by two horrific rapes and her parents’ divorce, in clear, lucid prose that promises compelling anecdotes and insights regarding her career as a cult “blaxploitation” movie icon. Unfortunately, Grier glosses over the productions of such deathless classics as Coffy, Foxy Brown and The Big Doll House, offering only perfunctory, generic observations about the films and milieu that made her a household name. Instead, the author concentrates on her personal relationships—engaging stuff when the memories involve the likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Richard Pryor, and Freddie Prinze, less so when she laments her breakups with “civilians” and problems with various family members. Grier has had her share of bad luck with men, including Abdul-Jabbar’s increasing dedication to Islam and embracing of anti-woman conventions, which ended a long and previously fulfilling union, while Pryor and Prinze flamboyantly self-destructed with drugs. Grier also survived a serious bout with cancer, and has much to say on the subject of racism in America, sadly none of it particularly interesting. The author’s reluctance to delve deeply into her acting work becomes increasingly frustrating as the memoir plods on. She briefly discusses Quentin Tarantino’s rehearsal-heavy technique while discussing her late-career triumph Jackie Brown, fleetingly mentioning co-star Robert Forster, with whom she created one of modern cinema’s most affecting and charming later-in-life romances. On her Showtime series The L Word, Grier deigns only to remark on the importance of the subject matter and how terrific and supportive the cast was. She also describes a wig worn on the show as “The Beast,” endowing it with more personality than any of the members of that wonderfully supportive cast.
Grier’s iconic force fails to translate to the page—a disappointment for fans of her unforgettable performances and reign as the queen of blaxploitation.Pub Date: April 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-54850-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Punk Planet/Akashic
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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