Frothy and honest remembrances for gossipy movie fans.
A popular actor’s “love letter to actresses.”
Wagner (You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age, 2014, etc.), now 86, returns with another installment of his life in the movies, this time focusing on the Hollywood ladies, many of whom he knew quite well thanks to a long career. If he didn’t work with them, he knew them socially or personally. His knowledge of Hollywood film history is prodigious. Don’t expect any bad-mouthing or dirt; “this is a book about character and craft, talent and genius, respect and love.” Mostly. Wagner admits to having a “brief, ships-in-the-night fling” with Joan Crawford, who had an “infectious personality and a huge drive.” Actresses, writes the author, “have it harder” than actors, and they also have shorter careers—“for every Meryl Streep there are ten Demi Moores and Meg Ryans, women who earned major salaries and major parts for precisely as long as they were the Hot Young Girl.” The actress cavalcade breezes by chronologically. Wagner starts in the 1930s and ends in the ’80s, with short chapters on two wives: Natalie Wood (“complicated”) and Jill St. John (a “good actress”). The author is succinct and pithy at giving a sense/opinion of who they were as people and what their strengths were as actresses. Gloria Swanson was “incisive,” “industrious” and “imperious.” Neither Jean Harlow nor Mae West was “particularly beautiful,” but both “made sex safe for the middle class.” Although Bette Davis was a “small woman,” she came into the “movie frame with a rush.” Marilyn Monroe was a “sweet, nervous girl” who became a “legend.” Some readers might find Wagner sexist and old-fashioned. Looks matter to him. Harlow had a “spectacular body” she liked to display; Jean Peters was “breathtaking;” Lana Turner had a “body that men would go to war over;” Brigitte Bardot was the “hottest thing on two legs.”
Frothy and honest remembrances for gossipy movie fans.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-42911-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
