The many indifferent, sophomoric essays here will give Tracy fans information about his early work; the best ones will give...
The obscure, often deservedly so, early films in which Spencer Tracy forged his screen persona are dusted off in this uneven collection of essays from the New England Vintage Film Society.
Before he developed into a film icon of rough-hewn moral integrity, Tracy was a contract player churning out forgettable entertainments for Fox Films in the early 1930s. The dozen flicks analyzed here provided him a broad palette of characters—jailbirds with hearts of gold, ruthless gangsters, macho lady-killers, sappy romantics, working-class mugs and amoral tycoons—but they also saddled him with contrived plots, clumsy scripts and dimwitted sidekicks trotted out to generate yucks. It’s forgivable that the film scholars and buffs assembled here don’t always take a liking to these films, less so that they don’t always take an interest in them. Short, shallow, badly edited—“The only character to which Tracy maintains any sort of affection is for his fellow sailor” [sic]—and often lacking in reader-friendly amenities such as plot summaries, many of the essays have the perfunctory feel of college term papers. Tracy’s naturalistic acting is praised to the skies, but readers get little feel for it because commentators rarely delve into his technique. Instead, they harp on the most obvious aspects of the films—racial and gender stereotypes, Depression-era cultural references, the mildly risqué gestures and badinage of pre-Production Code Hollywood. There are bright spots in the anthology, such as Eric Shoag’s sprightly appreciation of Tracy and Joan Bennett’s romance in Me and My Gal and Jeremy Bond’s interpretation of The Face in the Sky as “a reverse Wizard of Oz” in which “no place is as bad as home.” Charles Morrow’s fine study of Tracy as a comedic actor is a high point—a sharply written, aesthetically engaged retrospective that blends shrewd criticism with a vivid evocation of the actor’s onscreen presence.
The many indifferent, sophomoric essays here will give Tracy fans information about his early work; the best ones will give them reasons to see it.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2009
ISBN: 978-1436341387
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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