A cleareyed portrait of an impetuous and multitalented man.
Concise biography of a prominent Hollywood writer who became an outspoken advocate for Jewish causes.
In the Depression era, Ben Hecht (1893-1964) was one of the most famous—and highly paid—Hollywood screenwriters, whose prodigious movie credits include Scarface, Twentieth Century, Spellbound, and Notorious. Essayist and biographer Hoffman (Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City, 2016, etc.) rescues him from historical obscurity in a lively, well-researched addition to the Yale Jewish Lives series. Hecht was the son of Russian immigrants who moved during his childhood from the tenements of New York to Racine, Wisconsin. At 17, he dropped out of the University of Wisconsin and fled to Chicago with no plans except to escape. An uncle finagled a job for him at the Chicago Daily Journal, beginning his career as a reporter that honed his writing skills and inspired his acclaimed 1928 play, The Front Page, co-written with Charles MacArthur. Hecht was a colorful figure in Chicago, consorting with artists and writers who fomented the city’s cultural renaissance and getting his work published in Margaret Anderson’s groundbreaking literary journal, The Little Review. Chicago in the 1920s, one historian remarked, “was the Age of Hecht.” By 1924, he had married, become a father, and left his wife to move, with his lover, to Manhattan, where he dove enthusiastically into the “weeklong benders, wild parties, frantic extramarital coupling,” and heady creativity of Jazz Age America. Hollywood soon beckoned, and Hecht’s “glib wit and knowing insouciance” kept him in demand as a writer and script doctor. Not until 1939, when European anti-Semitism gained international attention, did Hecht embrace his Jewish identity. Although he insisted that “he wasn’t a man of causes,” he made a fervent, vociferous commitment “to the besieged Jews of Europe, to Palestine, and eventually to the state of Israel.” On March 9, 1943, 40,000 people gathered in Madison Square Garden to witness We Will Never Die, a star-studded production—Hecht’s “Jewish passion play”—publicizing the plight of European Jewry.
A cleareyed portrait of an impetuous and multitalented man.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-300-18042-8
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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