A magisterial, crazily comprehensive biographical study of the original renegade director: the man they loved to hate, Erich von Stroheim. Lennig (Film, Emeritus/SUNY Albany; The Count: The Life and Films of Bela Lugosi, not reviewed) spent 20 years researching his subject; the result is an exhaustive tapestry that transcends its critical-theoretical leanings to transport the reader back to Hollywood’s heady (and, for Stroheim, cruelly capricious) days. Discounting his hero’s lies and evasions about his past, Lennig pieces together the fragments of Stroheim’s humiliation-filled youth in the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Despite his claims of military service, Stroheim had been declared unfit to serve, a blow whose many effects on his films and his persona Lennig traces. Stroheim was socially alienated but also smart and ambitious enough to immigrate to America and climb the Hollywood ladder from extra to assistant director and scenarist, playing a number of —vile Huns— before directing his first picture, Blind Husbands, in 1919. He soon became notorious for both his prickly persona and an obsession with —realistic— filmmaking, which caused successive productions to devour funds and film stock. His artistic individualism could be bafflingly self-destructive, as in his bait-and-switch at Goldwyn, where the studio contracted for a lighthearted film and received the eight-hour-long Greed. Such tales flesh out a meticulous portrait of the often reckless silent-film era (the studio destroyed three fourths of Greed). Lennig offers exhaustive interpretive summaries of all Stroheim’s films before turning to his later descent. Swindled and blacklisted by ham-handed producers, he fell into near-penury in the 1930s, eventually escaping from Poverty Row films to become a respected (yet understandably embittered) actor in postwar France. Although Lennig underplays Stroheim’s legendary dark personal pursuits, he provides a definitive portrait of the notorious director and, in his accounting of the follies of art met by commerce, an affecting cultural history. (30 b&w photos)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8131-2138-8
Page Count: 550
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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
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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