A fly-on-the-wall view of the movie business as conducted by a highly eccentric director.
Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) was not much interested in understanding the details of modern life; he didn’t do his own shopping, sent others on errands, had artisans make him storage boxes and shirts, and knew nothing about how to fix such things as a printer without toner or a crashing computer. “It’s true,” writes D’Alessandro, Kubrick’s former personal assistant. “Stanley knew absolutely nothing about these frustrations, but it wasn’t a question of class. It’s because all he had to do was call Emilio.” An Italian expatriate in England at the turn of the 1970s, the author opens with the story of him turning down a job offer from John Wayne only to go to work for a rather helpless Kubrick in the uncertain business of moviemaking. His duties grew proportionally, and soon, by D’Alessandro’s account, he was part of the director’s daily routine. Indeed, the author is not shy of taking credit where Kubrick did not specifically give it to him for such things as suggesting the incidental music (“an orchestral piece featuring a French horn, an instrument that I had always liked a lot”) for The Shining and chasing down camera equipment that figured in Kubrick’s still and film photography. D’Alessandro is matter-of-fact and not boastful about these contributions. Just as much of his work involves negotiating a diplomatically delicate middle path between Kubrick and his wife, Christiane, in endless arguments over what to acquire and what to throw out, a case in point being “thousands of beeswax candles” specially made for Barry Lyndon. The book is funny and casual throughout. Of special interest are D’Alessandro’s set notes, revealing, for example, that the cat lady room in Clockwork Orange figured two decades later in Eyes Wide Shut.
As good an insider’s view of middle- to late-period Kubrick as there is.Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62872-669-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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