Like Kael’s own books, this bio is a page-turner.
The first biography of arguably the most influential and controversial film critic at a turning point in cinema history.
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) was a study in contradictions: a farm girl (albeit from an unusual community of Eastern European Jews in Petaluma, Calif.) and proud Westerner who became film critic for the most urbane of Eastern magazines, the New Yorker; an outspoken critic of the auteur theory who faithfully championed several auteurs of the 1970s, including Peckinpah, Altman, Scorsese, Coppola and de Palma; and an acolyte of high art who wrote most passionately about “trash” that hit her in the gut. A generous nurturer of younger writers, she could turn cold or even brutal if they didn’t act according to her plans for them. With her daughter Gina (who declined to participate in the book), Kael was dependent to the point of being an obstacle to her career and romances. But Kael’s life outside of the movies is background to the narrative, as it seems to have been for Kael herself as she lived it. “For Pauline,” writes Opera News features editor Kellow (Ethel Merman: A Life, 2007 etc.) writes, “being a spectator continued to be the best thing life could offer.” She first came to some prominence as a movie maven in San Francisco, where she selected programs for an art house and opined on films for listener-supported radio. She was already 50 when she began writing for the New Yorker, but those two decades of her life take up roughly 75 percent of Kellow’s book. Her influence owes probably most to her intensely personal writing style and her identification with and advocacy for the movie audience. Kellow performs biographical magic, telling her story mostly through her most famous (and notorious) reviews of some of the landmark films of the ’60s and ’70s: Bonnie and Clyde, M*A*S*H, Last Tango in Paris, Nashville, Jaws and Star Wars to name a few.
Like Kael’s own books, this bio is a page-turner.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02312-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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