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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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