Like Pakula’s films, Brown’s biography is specific, carefully assembled and straightforward, but also sometimes tepid and...
A workmanlike study of a workmanlike filmmaker.
As producer, screenwriter and director, Alan J. Pakula created an inconsistent body of work. He helmed outright flops (Rollover), middling thrillers (The Devil’s Own) and some mostly successful hits (Sophie’s Choice, All the President’s Men). An admirer of Pakula’s work, Brown (Zero Mostel: A Biography, 1989) surveys Pakula’s career with a clear eye, acknowledging Pakula’s uneven record, while suggesting that as time passes, some of his films (Klute and The Parallax View) are gaining in stature. With a keen sense of detail that Pakula would have admired, Brown traces his subject’s journey from first efforts as a Broadway producer to major success in Hollywood as producer of To Kill a Mockingbird. Brown rather briskly passes over Pakula’s subsequent misfires, though not without pinpointing why they failed. Pakula’s successes as a director receive more expansive treatment as Brown details Pakula’s meticulous recreation of the Washington Post newsroom for All the President’s Men and his sensitive adaptation of William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice. But as Pakula felt a film should serve its story in a clear, direct way, and as he worked in severe genres, he never became a major auteur, leaving the author in sometimes shallow water. Pakula did encourage his actors to improvise, take risks, ask questions and try various approaches to their roles, a receptive attitude that won devotion from the likes of Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline. Brown sketches out the details of Pakula’s personal life, which ended in 1998 when the filmmaker was killed in a car crash on Long Island. Pakula, friends and family repeat, was a mensch.
Like Pakula’s films, Brown’s biography is specific, carefully assembled and straightforward, but also sometimes tepid and flatly written.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8230-8799-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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