Published to coincide with the film’s 75th anniversary, this book is a gold mine for fans.
Everything you wanted to know about one of the greatest films of all time—and then some.
Orson Welles (1915-1985) could read when he was 2 and discuss politics at 3, and he wrote his first play at 9—or maybe that’s just a myth he started. But it’s widely accepted that the first film Welles co-wrote, directed, produced, and starred in is one of the truly great films. Lebo (The Godfather Legacy, 19997, etc.) agrees, and he makes a convincing case with this fascinating, in-depth story of the film’s making. Not only does he describe how the film was made, from beginning to end and afterward, but he also includes any film lover’s candy: cast and production credits, a conversation with Bernard Herrmann, who did the score, a detailed scene-by-scene guide (with running times), the film’s budget (actor Everett Sloane, who played Mr. Bernstein, received a $2,400 payment to shave his head), and more. After successes in radio and drama, the 25-year-old wunderkind was able to negotiate a contract with RKO to make two movies with the “most liberal creative terms ever granted to a director working within the confines of the traditional studio system.” Lebo skillfully sorts through the controversy of who exactly wrote the Kane screenplay. Herman J. Mankiewicz and John Houseman began work on a screenplay loosely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst. There were multiple drafts, with Welles editing each along the way. Commenting on the unconventional and difficult filming techniques used, cinematographer Gregg Toland said it “had to be done!” When film editor Robert Wise reviewed daily rushes, he felt they were on to “something very special.” Extensive quotes from many participants add a real immediacy to the story, and Lebo splendidly chronicles all the drama, infighting, ups and downs, excitement, and genius that went into creating Welles’ masterpiece.
Published to coincide with the film’s 75th anniversary, this book is a gold mine for fans.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07753-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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 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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