An informative and readable book that often resembles a long PR piece.
Obsessively detailed treatment of the director of The Avengers and creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and other TV series.
Debut nonfiction author Pascale, a director at MTV, delivers a biography of Whedon that caters to the massive worldwide community of sci-fi obsessives who won’t settle for anything less than exhaustive details on the object of their obsession. The author takes readers through the auteur's privileged upbringing—his father penned lyrics for Broadway shows and also wrote for The Electric Company and Golden Girls—and formative educational years spent first in an English boarding school and then studying film at prestigious Wesleyan University, where he cut his teeth as both a teacher and a writer/director. After a stint as a video clerk, Whedon’s break as a writer came through his father’s industry connections; eventually, he landed a job as a writer on Roseanne in the early 1990s; not long after, he sold the screenplay for the original movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But Whedon would bounce around from show to show as a behind-the-scenes writer and script doctor until his proverbial big break came in the mid-1990s when his Buffy character was refined and recast as a weekly TV series on the WB network. That series lasted almost seven years and accumulated an intense, devoted following. Pascale totally immerses the reader in the “Whedonverse,” a sort of neo-feminist supernatural world grounded in everyday human dilemmas. The author pens worshipful prose throughout, extolling Whedon’s never-ending quest for complete control over his work, and she occasionally goes overboard: For example, does even the most obsessive fan really care what brand of pen and notepad Whedon prefers? By the end of the book, Pascale has adequately familiarized us with the creative commercial artist side of Whedon; however, the actual human being behind all the demons and vampires is never satisfactorily fleshed out.
An informative and readable book that often resembles a long PR piece.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61374-104-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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