A fan letter in the form of a biography.
A celebratory biography of the director “whose public persona is instantly and eternally assumed to be his real personality.”
In an email quoted in its entirety, Woody Allen advised Evanier (All the Things You Are: The Life of Tony Bennett, 2011, etc.) against writing this book. “All the facts about my life have been written about and rewritten about,” Allen said, “and my work has been dissected in books and articles all over the world for years.” He was concerned, as well, that the author’s assessments of his movies were “wrong-headed appraisals and would not add anything to the cultural landscape.” Unfortunately, Evanier persisted, and he has produced a bloated, repetitious, overly rapturous biography filled with plot summaries, reviews, and excerpts from Allen’s many interviews and profiles. His interviewees include a few of Allen’s childhood friends; colleagues, such as his casting director; his forgiving first wife, Harlene Rosen Allen; a writer who confesses that she is “one of Allen’s most obsessed fans”; critics John Simon and Richard Schickel; and Dick Cavett, whose interview with the author appears in full. “This is not a blow-by-blow or a standard critical biography,” writes the author, but rather an effort to “make Allen known and understood in a deeper way.” To Evanier, Allen “is the most amazing phenomenon in the history of American show business,” greater even than Charlie Chaplin. “His continuity and high rate of productivity are unprecedented,” though some work falls short: “Interiors,” for example, “is practically unwatchable.” Not surprisingly, the author mounts considerable evidence to defend Allen against accusations of sexual impropriety regarding his affair with Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter and sexual abuse of another daughter. Evanier concedes, however, “that Allen appears to feel guiltless about his behavior toward women. He seems to feel no sense of responsibility,” an attitude that does not diminish the author’s adulation.
A fan letter in the form of a biography.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04726-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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