These appraisals, notable for their broad critical vision, may persuade some to reconsider Kazan’s work, if not his...
Time magazine film critic Schickel seeks to bolster Kazan’s reputation as a major American film and theater talent.
Fifty-three years after he named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Elia Kazan remains a lightning rod. Mention of his name draws anger, as the outcries over his receiving an honorary Oscar in 1999 attest. Controversy unfairly clouds Kazan’s oeuvre, Schickel argues, claiming that “no one has ever been such a dominant directorial force simultaneously in film and theater.” Shickel’s objectives thus become two-fold: to challenge the impact—or the damage—of Kazan’s HUAC testimony, and to assess the value of the plays and films Kazan directed. The author follows Kazan’s work in the 1930s with the Group Theater, emphasizing that Kazan’s eventual disenchantment with their work centered on matters related to Communism. Kazan, he repeats, endorsed only the more general ideals of Communism while disdaining the goals of American Communists, which many Group members embraced. Kazan’s career reached an unparalleled ascendancy during the ’50s, Schickel writes, with two now classic Broadway productions, A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman, and several films, notably On the Waterfront. Working with Kazan’s hitherto unpublished production notebooks, Schickel provides valuable insight into Kazan’s work on these lyrical plays and documentary-like films. As for Kazan’s HUAC testimony, which coincided with this peak in his career, he downplays its damage and empathizes with its practicality: not to name the names of people who were going to be exposed sooner or later, Schickel writes, would have been career suicide for the director. “The blacklist was only occasionally a tragedy; mostly it was an inconvenience,” he concludes, an observation that’s certain to keep churning the arguments over Kazan’s actions before HUAC.
These appraisals, notable for their broad critical vision, may persuade some to reconsider Kazan’s work, if not his political behavior.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-019579-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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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