Zesty anecdotes about family, marriage, and fatherhood combine with Hollywood gossip to make for an entertaining romp.
The director of The Addams Family and Men in Black tells all.
Sonnenfeld makes his debut as a memoirist with a brisk, funny recounting of his improbable rise to fame in the movie world. With a brief interlude as a cameraman for porn films—an experience he recalls in visceral detail—Sonnenfeld carved out a successful career as a cinematographer (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona), director of photography (Big, When Harry Met Sally), and movie and TV director (Addams Family Values, Get Shorty, and Pushing Daisies). The only child of a neurotic, manipulative mother who “had a very fluid relationship with the truth” and a philandering father, the young Barry was sexually abused by his mother’s first cousin, who lived with the family for a while. When Sonnenfeld confronted his parents about the abuse, they responded coolly: “don’t forget child molestation didn’t have the same stigma back then that it has now.” His mother smothered him with her fears, threatening to kill herself if he opted to go to a residential college, but she also encouraged him to go to film school when she saw that his career as a photographer was not taking off. Although his parents reneged on their offer to pay tuition—“Don’t be ridiculous. I would never say such a thing,” his mother exclaimed after he enrolled—NYU’s film school launched him into cinematography. Sonnenfeld offers a behind-the-scenes look at the many directors, producers, and actors with whom he worked. The Coen brothers, he writes, were “total novices” when they started filming Blood Simple, a low-budget movie that brought Sonnenfeld to the attention of Penny Marshall, who needed a cinematographer for Big. Sonnenfeld came to like Marshall despite her legendary indecisiveness and negativity; she balked at Sonnenfeld’s visual style and even Tom Hanks’ acting. The author was in the midst of filming When Harry Met Sally when volatile, unpredictable Scott Rudin summoned him to direct The Addams Family—after several other directors turned Rudin down.
Zesty anecdotes about family, marriage, and fatherhood combine with Hollywood gossip to make for an entertaining romp.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-41561-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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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