Two so-so recent biographies of the euphoric film-director Preston Sturges (1898-1959), by James Curtis and Donald Spoto, and Sturges's posthumous autobiography, Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges (1990), are now followed by a critical biography that has a keener eye for the nuts and bolts of Sturges's scripts and his filmmaking than Curtis, Spoto, or even Sturges himself had. Film-historian Jacobs draws on interviews with Sturges's wives and survivors, including his fellow workers and artists, and from his personal letters, diaries, scripts, and photographs. Before he even leaves for Hollywood in the early 30's, Sturges has already lived several lives—and is only 34. After his birth in Chicago, his much-married mother leaves his father, elopes with wealthy Solomon Sturges, tours Europe with her best buddy—free-styled bacchante Isadora Duncan—and starts up her own line of cosmetics, with 16-year-old, penniless Preston as her New York office manager, salesman, and factotum. Loathing culture and Shakespeare, Sturges keeps these early years a screwball frolic, desires most to be an inventor. In 1929, Strictly Dishonorable makes him a hit Broadway playwright. He marries an heiress; writes three flops; and gets called to Hollywood, where scriptwriting at last pays off, leading him to a rare slot as writer-director. Here, we follow Sturges through draft after draft of The Great McGinty, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock, Unfaithfully Yours, and many lesser works that Jacobs sifts for comic genius. For fun, Sturges is also a restaurateur. Then, after 13 years on top, the descent begins and the third highest-paid man in America ends up busted and a wanderer. Jacobs rarely smiles, but this dig into the archaeology of Sturges scripts and photos (54 b&w) is most welcome—and raising Preston is still enough.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-520-07926-4
Page Count: 538
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992
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
PERSPECTIVES
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