A thorough, insightful study not only of Fields’ film comedies, but of the inner turmoil that fueled his genius.
The final volume of a biographical trilogy captures W.C. Fields’ ascent to Hollywood immortality.
If his movie career had ended with his appearances in silent films between 1925 and 1928, W.C. Fields might only have been remembered as a second-tier talent. “I am at a stage where I cannot get an offer at all,” he wrote his wife after his first, not-too-memorable stint as a film actor. “I have been badly handled and am now out of the movies.” But after returning to Hollywood in 1931, Fields successfully made the transition to sound pictures, leaving an indelible mark on film comedy history with such classics as “It’s a Gift,” “The Bank Dick,” and “Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.” Wertheim (W.C. Fields From the Ziegfeld Follies and Broadway Stage to the Screen, 2016, etc.) colorfully and comprehensively captures Fields’ journey from “sacrificial lamb thrust aside” by Hollywood to “American cultural icon” in this final volume of a biographical trilogy. Fields was a “virtuoso comedian…who brought so much laughter to millions while enduring so much anguish,” he writes. The book makes effective use of a newly available archive of Fields’ papers to add texture to its portrait of a man whose life has already been the subject of numerous studies. “I stunk so badly the police came in [the theater] with the impression that someone had been throwing stink bombs around,” Fields wrote of one of his performances. Wertheim focuses mainly on the work, not only showing how Fields used his vaudeville background and vocal gifts to fashion his unique comic routines and persona, but also how iconoclastic many of his films were. “Instead of idealizing the sacrosanct family dining table as a place of tranquility, Fields lampoons it as a place of domestic turmoil,” he observes of “The Bank Dick.” But as the author also vividly shows, Fields’ comic genius cannot be separated from his inner turmoil, which manifested itself in his legendary drinking, his failed relationships with women, and a cantankerous disposition that prompted one director to call him “the most obstinate, ornery son of a bitch I ever tried to work with.” As with so many artists, fame could only go so far to fill the “voids in his life.”
A thorough, insightful study not only of Fields’ film comedies, but of the inner turmoil that fueled his genius.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-137-47329-5
Page Count: 428
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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