Juicy, but it leaves a nasty aftertaste.
Based on the movie star’s late-night ramblings, an unvarnished account of her marriages and affairs in golden-age Hollywood.
The films she made weren’t the principal basis of Ava Gardner’s fame, so it’s no great disappointment that there’s little here about The Sun Also Rises, Mogambo or The Barefoot Contessa (to name the ones people might actually remember today). British journalist Evans (Nemesis: The True Story of Aristotle Onassis, Jackie O, and the Love Triangle That Brought Down the Kennedys, 2004, etc.) encouraged her to focus on her personal life, and she let loose with plenty of frank, bawdy material about husbands Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra, plus a long list of lovers topped by Howard Hughes and George C. Scott. But even as she was confiding that sex with Rooney was so great they were still indulging after their divorce and that Scott was a mean drunk who frequently beat her bloody, she was having second thoughts about a memoir. Broke and recovering from a stroke, she asked Evans to be her ghostwriter in 1988 because, she explained, “I either write the book or sell the jewels. And I’m kinda sentimental about the jewels.” But she never really liked the idea and was often shocked to read Evans’ transcriptions of her profanity-laden speech and the salacious stories she probably wished she’d kept to herself. Indeed, since Evans got most of this material from phone calls the insomniac Gardner made when she couldn’t sleep and had been drinking, the whole project smacks of exploitation, especially since Gardner eventually decided against allowing this revealing document to be published. Evans revived the project after her death with the permission of her estate, and the pages he produced before his death last year certainly give a vivid sense of Gardner’s salty, no-BS personality. Nonetheless, reading it feels somewhat like going through a person’s bureau drawers when she’s not home.
Juicy, but it leaves a nasty aftertaste.Pub Date: July 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2769-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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
PERSPECTIVES
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