One of the great British cinematographers, Young completed this slender autobiography shortly before his death at 96 last December. Young enjoyed—and that is definitely the word—a long and distinguished career as a director of photography. He shot over 160 feature films (as well as thousands of commercials), was awarded an Order of the British Empire by the queen, and won Oscars for his work on Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, and Ryan’s Daughter, his three collaborations with David Lean. A list of the directors he worked with would include not only Lean, but also John Ford, George Cukor, Vincente Minnelli, King Vidor, Sir Carol Reed, and Michael Powell. Young was one of the last survivors of the silent era, having begun his career as a lab assistant at Gaumont Studios when he was only 14. In this gently amusing volume he emerges as a gracious figure, albeit one who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Clearly a man who loves his work, Young is at his most animated when he’s explaining how he and his team conquered technical challenges. How does one re-create snowswept Russia in temperate Spain? (With a mixture of marble dust, shaving cream, and whitewash.) What are the special problems that accompany shooting in the Sahara Desert? (Keeping people’s footprints out of the sand dunes is one of the most prominent of these.) The book is a loosely chronological retelling of Young’s career, sprinkled with pleasant anecdotes, but little of his personal life comes out. An amiable read for film buffs.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-571-19793-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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