Funny, ever entertaining, immensely readable and revealing autobiography of action/suspense director Don Siegel and how he made or contributed to some 50 or more movies and TV shows. For buffs spellbound by the inner organs of moviemaking, Siegel (b. 1912) chooses a terrific way to tell his saga: by improvised screenplay dialogue. Siegel co-wrote most of his scripts and has a faultless ear for the voices of his fellow directors, co- writers, famous cameramen, producers, and giants like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Henry Fonda, and Elvis; actors like Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Edward O'Brien, Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, and Viveca Lindfors (Siegel's ex-wife); and studio execs like Hal Wallis and ogre Jack Warner. Siegel opens smashingly, with the taming of obscenity-spouting John Wayne for his farewell role as the cancer-ridden gunfighter of The Shootist (1976). Highlights include the making of prison pictures Riot in Cell Block 11 and Escape from Alcatraz; the horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers; detective flicks Dirty Harry, Madigan, and Coogan's Bluff; westerns Flaming Star and Two Mules for Sister Sara; crime epics Baby Face Nelson and Crime in the Streets; and oddities such as Clint Eastwood's The Beguiled. Siegel joined Warner Brothers in 1934 and worked his way through all the lesser departments of filmmaking until being put in charge of a second unit that created montages and inserts that glued stories together. For years, his fast-made but inventive montages accounted for more film per year than the footage of each of the studio's first-level directors. Siegel complains about studio heads, draws blood on folks who sold him out, and details the idiocy of trying to make a film (Rough Cut) produced by egomaniac Broadway producer David Merrick. So Dirty Harry isn't Hamlet! One of the top-drawer screen books, from which you rise gorged from an eye-popping Thanksgiving dinner of filmcraft. (Sixty b&w photographs)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-571-16270-3
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
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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