A sprightly memoir by a pioneering female screenwriter. Born in 1900 to Russian radicals who had immigrated to New York City, Frederica Sagor answered an ad for story editor at Universal and by her mid-20s had written several hit films, including The Plastic Age and The Waning Sex. By the time she left the business in 1950, she and her husband, writer-producer Ernest Maas, had worked on dozens of movies with major directors and stars. Charlie Chaplin sat at her commissary table; John Ford cut out of a party early with her; Joan Crawford was a hick named Lucille LeSueur who entreated the well-clad writer to take her shopping and dress her like a star. The breezy text is chockablock with colloquialisms, and slang fans will especially appreciate Maas’s descriptions of women: girls with plenty of “ginger,” or great “gams,” or who, like the author herself, “learned about the good old pessary and so felt free to play the field.” In his foreword, film historian Kevin Brownlow rightly places the book in the context of film history. But Maas does not write with Film History in mind; she tells of how she made her living in a tough profession and enjoyed a lasting marriage. Brownlow says that the book will make readers “angry,” and some injustices do raise ire, such as MGM stealing the couple’s idea for an in-theater promotion or 20th-Century Fox gaudily transforming their upright story, Miss Pilgrim’s Progress, into the Betty Grable vehicle The Shocking Miss Pilgrim. But for the most part, the blackballing, debauchery, and mogul mendacity described sound just like Hollywood today. The names may have changed, the films may have acquired sound, but the small-minded boss is eternal. Not a literary masterpiece, but more important proof of women’s participation—if not recognition—behind the scenes in early Hollywood. A filmography would have been welcome. (30 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8131-2122-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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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