Film critic Weddle's first book is a comprehensive, if somewhat overwritten, biography of a legendary Hollywood maverick. Sam Peckinpah's (19251984) career is yet another monument to the destructiveness of the Hollywood machine and the self- destructive tendencies of alcoholics. As Weddle tells it, Peckinpah's early life inculcated in him a macho obsession with guns, booze, and a certain self-conscious toughness, all of which was filtered through an artist's considerable sensitivity. His best films are poised on the cusp between those two poles, a reflection of his need to please both his tight-lipped lawyer father and his overprotective, hysterical mother. Out of that crucible emerged a brilliant but tormented filmmaker who repeatedly drank and fought himself out of work. On the other hand, as Weddle's account makes clear, Peckinpah's stern sense of artistic integrity, combined with his penchant for on-the-set improvisations, made him somewhat ill- suited for the rigidity of Hollywood filmmaking, even after the studio system had all but collapsed. Weddle has interviewed over 100 family members, friends, and colleagues of Peckinpah's and read extensively in his diaries and papers, and the research shows. On the other hand, his writing is often turgid, filled with overextended metaphors. His critical judgments are sometimes debatable (how many film historians would agree with him that the '60s are the most interesting decade in American film?), but the production histories of films like The Wild Bunch and Major Dundee are exemplary. Finally, as Peckinpah's career begins to founder on the rocks of booze and cocaine, Weddle seems to run out of steam. Never less than interesting, this volume makes a nice complement to Marshall Fine's Bloody Sam (1991), drawing on some new sources and adding to the picture of a troubled and troublesome artist.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8021-1546-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
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
PERSPECTIVES
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