Hurst’s reputation, though, has now been ably resurrected by a devoted albeit not uncritical friend and student. He couldn’t...
Memoir of a friendship with a gay, Irish, octogenarian filmmaker.
In the 1970s, Robbins (Test of Courage, 2000, etc.) was a scrappy free-lance journalist, deep in debt, barely able to pay his rent, who was then introduced to Brian Desmond Hurst, a leading Irish filmmaker who wanted to cap his career by making a movie about the events leading up to the birth of Jesus. “Larry Oliver” had already agreed to participate in the project. Robbins at first wanted to back off—Hurst seemed a little weird, and Robbins had never read, let alone written, a screenplay. But Hurst offered a whopping salary, and Robbins signed on. Robbins quickly figured out that Hurst had his own financial woes; he was often unable to find the cash either to pay the milkman or cover his bar tab. Even when friends and associates offered to back the movie, some psychological block prevented Hurst from moving forward. So the film was never made. Still, Robbins and Hurst traveled, and drank, and occasionally wrote. Robbins began working with his eccentric friend on his memoirs, another project that never saw the light of day. But along the way, Hurst included Robbins in a number of adventures, including friendship with (and theft from) a Russian baroness and spy. Robbins’s droll account (winner of the Saga Award for Wit, given previously to Alexander McCall Smith) also offers a glimpse into the gay subculture of pre–Stonewall England—Hurst was sometimes discriminated against by movie execs who didn’t want to work with a “bugger.” He died in 1986 and, despite a career that had included making Malta Story and Tom Brown’s Schooldays, was rapidly forgotten. The filmmaker, says Robbins, “outlived his reputation”—when he died, he hadn’t made a film in two decades.
Hurst’s reputation, though, has now been ably resurrected by a devoted albeit not uncritical friend and student. He couldn’t have wished for a finer tribute.Pub Date: May 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-56025-709-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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