The inside book on Woody Allen that his fans have been waiting for. This will likely be the cornerstone of all future Woody Allen studies, sincefor the first timeAllen himself is completely forthcoming with an interviewer and willing to fill in on his biography and comment on any aspect of his work. You could not ask for an Allen book that gets closer to the bone. Lax (Life and Death on 10 West, 1984; On Being Funny: Woody Allen and Comedy, 1975) kept by Allen's side for three years during the writing, making, and editing of five films, followed scripts through their development, had the door opened for him by Allen to speak with all of Allen's friends and co-workers, which is to say that this is a book Allen was eager to see and warmly endorsed. This writing is unique in that while it stays generally on course as a chronology of Allen's life, it forever interrupts itself to show at length how later works spring out of earlier events in Allen's life, which gives a dense weave to the telling as scenes are discussed out of biographical order. The Allen who comes across here is a very cool and reserved person on the set who has to crank up his warmth when he plays ``Woody Allen'' for the camera. We follow his childhood compulsion for moviegoing through his Wunderkind years as a teen-age jokesmith for columnists and great TV comics, then his being taken under the wing of agents Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe, whoin a grueling two-year periodturned him into a reluctant stand-up comic. They've never had a contract beyond a handshake, and quite early on Rollins and Joffe won complete artistic control of his films. Allen openly talks about his marriages and love life, his children, his failureshe never looks at his films after they're released, has no videocassettes of them, only sees their shortcomings (although The Purple Rose of Cairo comes closest to realizing his hopes), and he detests tapes of his early work on Candid Camera, The Tonight Show, etc. In one fascinating passage he comments on these routines while watching tapes, dismantling them in bloody surgical detail. Definitivefor now. And sheer heaven. (Sixteen pages of photographsnot seen.)
Pub Date: May 16, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-58349-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1991
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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