Still, these crystalline snapshots of a long-gone Hollywood should please most cinéastes.
A well-constructed anthology that provides satisfying meditations on film scandals both notorious and obscure.
McLean (Film Studies/Univ. of Texas) and Cook (A History of Narrative Film, not reviewed) assemble a cast of contributors who examine the “enormously potent and diverse historical, cultural, and ideological meanings” of such star scandals as Fatty Arbuckle’s manslaughter trial and Wallace Reid’s narcotics addiction. Sam Stoloff takes a novel approach to understanding Arbuckle (arguably the first mediated cinema scandal) by juxtaposing his moralized, melodramatic fall from grace with the concurrent Chicago White Sox scandal, noting how each resulted in self-imposed autocratic controls upon the respective industries. Mark Anderson sensitively traces how overworked early star Reid succumbed to the nascent film colony’s accessible drug scene, and how his demise was shamelessly exploited in campaigns to criminalize addiction. Nancy Cook resurrects a fascinating obscurity from Hollywood’s long-tortured relationship with race: the tale of Long Lance, a celebrated Ojibwa Indian who in 1928 starred in an “all-Indian” melodrama The Silent Enemy and was subsequently ruined by accusations (from other cast members) that he was, in fact, Negro. An important chapter by Cynthia Baron concerns the 1948 Red-baiting of the Actors’ Laboratory (a prominent theater company and school); its members were all blacklisted in a pungent prelude to McCarthyism. Other significant discussions concern the role of 1950s magazines like Confidential in “systematizing” scandal, and the travails encountered by pioneers of sexual independence (such as Hedy Lamarr, Ingrid Bergman, Rita Hayworth, and Jane Fonda). These are lively and culturally novel explorations; unfortunately, most of the writers fall back at points upon abstruse and alienating academic prose.
Still, these crystalline snapshots of a long-gone Hollywood should please most cinéastes.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8135-2885-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Rutgers Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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
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