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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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