Not the definitive biography that historians and fans may have hoped for, but an entertaining read as well as a bittersweet...
Once again, Chandler (I, Fellini, 1995, etc.) lets an acclaimed and beloved filmmaker tell his life story largely in his own words.
When he died earlier this year at the age of 95, Billy Wilder’s artistic legacy included such classics as Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment, all of which he directed and co-wrote. Born to German-speaking Jewish parents in an area of Austria-Hungary that's now part of Poland, Wilder worked as a journalist in Vienna and Berlin before becoming a screenwriter. His career in the German film industry was cut short when Hitler came to power, and he eventually wound up in the US. Although he spoke little English on his arrival, he became one of the great screenwriters of Hollywood's golden age. His films, usually written in collaboration, first with Charles Brackett, then later with I.A.L. Diamond, are noted for their sophisticated, sometimes cynical, humor and an ear for the found poetry of the American vernacular unmatched by any other filmmaker with the possible exception of Preston Sturges. Wilder was also a world-class raconteur, which proves both a strength and a weakness here. (The title, from the memorable last line of Some Like It Hot, also neatly sums up Wilder's wryly mordant worldview.) His anecdotes are fascinating and often hilarious, but many of them may already be familiar to readers of earlier accounts, most notably Cameron Crowe's Conversations with Wilder (1999). In addition, Chandler makes only the most cursory attempt to put Wilder's work into any sort of critical context, all too often simply letting him do the talking, along with various friends and collaborators, and limiting herself to potted synopses of his films and the occasional piece of necessary exposition.
Not the definitive biography that historians and fans may have hoped for, but an entertaining read as well as a bittersweet memorial to one of cinema's true originals.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-1709-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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