An entertaining, well-documented history of the legendary studio for film scholars and fans alike.
The colorful history of the renowned Warner Bros. film studio and the brothers who founded it in the early 1920s.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Jewish Lives series, renowned film scholar Thomson (Television: A Biography, 2016, etc.) explores the lives of the Jewish immigrant siblings who reinvented themselves as the Warner Brothers. The author explores the contributions of each of the brothers, but the most notable character is Jack Warner (1892-1978), a successfully intuitive studio head and quintessential Hollywood scoundrel who would go on to achieve one of the most lucrative careers in the business. There have been plenty of books about the studio and the brothers, and their Jewish immigrant story has already been exhaustively recounted in Neil Gabler’s monumental group biography Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1988). Nonetheless, within this slim volume, Thomson offers a compelling, well-packed narrative. He vividly appraises WB’s signature genres, such as the early gangster films and backstage musicals, within a grounded social history of the country and gives meaningful weight to how and why the studio flourished during the Depression and the war years. “Warners was more honest about hard times than any other studio,” writes the author. “It was the factory system that defied the slump….As the box office faltered, Warners gave us dames, gunfire, jazzy music, wisecracks, and outrageous, unhindered ids in smart suits, guys who’ll go for broke because they know they’re doomed.” While Thomson provides a lively overview of the brothers’ lives, his commentary on the many enduring WB stars, including James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, and Bette Davis, and the back stories behind several classic films such as The Jazz Singer, Public Enemy, and Casablanca, are also noteworthy.
An entertaining, well-documented history of the legendary studio for film scholars and fans alike.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-300-19760-0
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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