An impressive work of scholarship, this collection offers a sweeping look at 60 years of American popular culture and an...
An engrossing collection chronicles the acclaimed director’s life and work.
Kazan (1909–2003) directed both plays and movies, winning Tony Awards, Oscars and many other awards. He also wrote a handful of novels and more than 1,200 letters. The Devlins have judiciously chosen 300, providing an informative context of theater and film history spiced with a hefty dose of gossip. Kazan’s correspondents feature a prominent cast of producers, actors and playwrights, as well as his wife and children. He wrote to John D. Rockefeller III about establishing Lincoln Center’s Repertory Theatre, of which Kazan became co-director; to John Steinbeck about the filming of his novel East of Eden (1955), with the unknown actor James Dean; to writer Budd Schulberg, explaining why Marlon Brando was “WRONG” for On the Waterfront (Kazan considered the very young Paul Newman: “This boy will definitely be a film star”). The letters reveal Kazan as restless, opinionated and fiercely ambitious. “I always had a great thirst for knowledge,” he wrote when he was 23. “When I was younger I actually had a fear that some kid would know more about some subject than I did. I tried to know everything about everything.” That fear persisted: When he was 45, he confessed to having “very large self doubts, especially on an intellectual level.” His doubts, though, did not deter him from challenging projects, including Thornton Wilder’s enigmatic The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949) and After the Fall (1964). He was Tennessee Williams’ director of choice, beginning with A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1956) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1960). Copious letters to his wife reveal both his passion for his work and his many affairs (one with the “touching pathetic waif” Marilyn Monroe).
An impressive work of scholarship, this collection offers a sweeping look at 60 years of American popular culture and an intimate portrait of one complex man whirling at its center.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-26716-0
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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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