Intimate story of Harry, Jack, Albert, and Sam Warner and how they rose from immigrant rags to Hollywood riches by founding the Warner Brothers Studio—as told by Harry's granddaughter and family archivist Sperling, who spent 11 years researching, aided by Millner and with contributions by Jack Warner Jr., Ronald Reagan, and others. Though its invented dialogue reads like fiction, this biomosaic of the Warner brothers and their studio comes off as a neat bit of storytelling, shored up with long quotes from family members, studio executives, and the talents who worked with the Warners. Jack Warner—the youngest brother, who outlived the others and who, through a swift shot of financial skulduggery, became sole brother in charge—is marked as the singing and joking villain of the piece. Benjamin Warner flees the Russian village of Krasnashiltz and arrives in New York in 1883. In 1904, his young sons fall in love with the nickelodeon business, soon buy their own projector, lease a theater, and, by 1907, form the Duquesne Amusement Supply Company for distributing films. Jack, formerly Jacob, quits school in fourth grade, brings home two dollars a week by singing in public, then is hired by his brothers to drive people out of the theater between shows with his bad voice. The studio's growth as it makes features on Poverty Row—with Jack and Sam heading production in Hollywood and Harry running the New York office as final authority—first climaxes with Al Jolson introducing talkies at the thrilling premiere of The Jazz Singer, though fun-loving brother Sam dies as Jolson opens. Harry tries to give the studio some class while vulgar Jack focuses on slam-bang movies from the headlines. Finally, the monster that is TV arises. Best pages are from Jack Warner, Jr., the son fired from the studio by his father for reminding him too strongly of the father's first wife. (Thirty-two-page photo insert)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55958-343-6
Page Count: 350
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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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