Solid work in desperate need of the careful attention of a competent copy editor.
Well-informed biography of the flamboyant director, utterly lacking the stylishness that made his films so memorable.
The son of touring players, Vincente Minnelli (1903–86) had only the briefest experience of the kind of small-town, Midwestern life he would later enshrine in such popular MGM fare as Meet Me in St. Louis and Father of the Bride. Film scholar Levy (All About Oscar, 2003, etc.) does a commendable job with Minnelli’s early professional years in Chicago and New York, where he dressed department-store windows and designed sets and costumes for movie theaters’ stage shows; he would remain deeply, some said overly, concerned with visual effects in all of his films. Levy also evinces a solid understanding of the essentially somber worldview that made Minnelli as successful with melodramas like The Bad and the Beautiful as with such brilliant musicals as An American in Paris and Gigi. He was the quintessential studio director, capable in most genres and able to produce highly personal work within the assembly-line system’s confines. Indeed, first wife Judy Garland complained that he didn’t support her in the battles with MGM that led to her spectacular flameout and the couple’s divorce. The bisexual Minnelli’s stormy union with Garland is the only one of his four marriages that receives much attention here, and only a single male partner is mentioned by name. Aside from a rather catty portrait of his close bond with daughter Liza, the director’s personal life is scanted in favor of his career, which makes sense since he lived for his work. Levy’s judgments about the films are sound; it’s a pity they’re conveyed in dreadful, occasionally incomprehensible prose. This sentence about Father of the Bride is regrettably typical: “Stanley confronts his worst fear of humiliation, here reflected actually a nightmare rather than imagining or dreaming about at.” Such painfully inept presentation undercuts the author’s strong case that Minnelli is the most underrated of Hollywood’s Golden Age craftsmen.
Solid work in desperate need of the careful attention of a competent copy editor.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-32925-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
