Film star Williams reveals all, including how every hair and eyelash remained in place during the spectacular water ballets that were the core of most of her movies. The 1940—50 Williams’s films, like Neptune’s Daughter, Thrill of a Romance and Million Dollar Mermaid, are featured on cable television’s movie channels, so a younger generation of viewers is familiar with the signature splashing fountains, corps de bathing beauty, and spectacular Esther Williams smile. Here’s a description of how those effects were achieved (oil and Vaseline for the hair; the smile was her own), as well as tales about the star’s four marriages, several affairs, three children, and coming of age as a contract player in the MGM “finishing school,” along with Lana Turner, Katharine Hepburn, June Allyson, and Judy Garland. The Esther Williams films, as bland and predictable as the plots were, were big moneymakers. Only 18 years old when she signed with MGM, she had already been in the Olympics, where she swam fast, and a star of Billy Rose’s Aquacade, where she swam “pretty.” Straightforward and unpretentious, she understood that it was the wet Williams that drew people to her films. She developed increasingly complicated routines (precursors of synchronized swimming) and did her own sometimes dangerous stunts—she once broke three neck vertebrae in a diving sequence. As her career tapered off in the mid-'50s, she found that her second husband had lost or gambled away virtually all the money she'd earned in the water. Unhappy and confused, she took LSD (overseen by a doctor); it was like “instant psychoanalysis” and enabled her next marriage, to actor Fernando Lamas, although uneven, to last for 22 years until his death. Now happily married to husband number four, she heads a bathing suit firm. With the help of L.A. media critic Diehl, this is written with humor and a sense of proportion that leaven the usual movie star bio. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85284-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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
© 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.
