This first book by Los Angeles Times correspondent Herman is an exhaustively complete biography of Wyler, director of such acclaimed films as Ben-Hur, The Best Years of Our Lives, Wuthering Heights, Jezebel, and The Letter. William Wyler was the Hollywood director's director, a man whose work includes some of the most honored films of all time. A list of the stars he worked with is a veritable who's who of the film industry, led by Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Gary Cooper, and Barbra Streisand. Ironically, as Herman recounts, Wyler was the black sheep of his family of well-to-do Alsatian Jews. He was a mischievous kid who managed to get himself thrown out of a fancy private school and who showed little inclination to apply himself to finding a career. Eventually, his doting mother would draw on a family connection to Carl Laemmle, founder and owner of Universal Pictures, shipping her son off to America with ``Uncle'' Carl. After a few false starts as a shipping clerk, publicity assistant, and gofer, the young Wyler began to work his way up the ladder, directing two-reel westerns before graduating to features. With the coming of sound, Wyler would quickly establish himself as a great director of actors and a maker of fluid, graceful films. Herman tells his story intelligently, offering portraits along the way of Wyler friends and nemeses like Sam Goldwyn and Darryl F. Zanuck. Herman is candid about such episodes as his protagonist's affair with Bette Davis and even manages to occasionally say some useful things about the films (he is particularly good on The Letter), although he's barking up the wrong tree when he suggests that the many Oscars won by Wyler films and their participants somehow certify Wyler's genius. A model Hollywood biography: cogent, to the point, candid, briskly written, and never dull.
Pub Date: Jan. 3, 1996
ISBN: 0-399-14012-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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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