The man now considered America's greatest movie star is chronicled seriously and fully, but not always movingly or with new critical insight. Unsurprisingly for a work by a veteran literary biographer (Robert Frost, 1996, etc.), Bogart radiates an erudition uncommon to film bios. It skillfully interweaves quotes from disparate sources (Umberto Eco, Michael Curtiz, and Groucho Marx within six paragraphs), and makes a logical link between Bogart and his tough-guy contemporary Ernest Hemingway; the book's opening pages are devoted to detailing the parallels between the two men. Meyers's respectful approach fits his subject, whom he presents as intellectually restless, morally upright, politically aware, and courageous in facing the esophageal cancer that killed him. As befits the genre, there are plenty of anecdotes, though some, like the Bogart-Bacall meeting on To Have and Have Not and George Raft's rejection of the lead role in The Maltese Falcon, are familiar. Meyers's look at Bogart's relationship with John Huston provides insight into how both worked, and the stormy marriage to Mayo Methot is played out in nice detail. Bacall comes off a bit tarnished here: She loved Bogart but was extravagant, infatuated with Adlai Stevenson, and had an affair with Sinatra at the end of Bogart's life. Most amusing are the author's throwaway lines (``Huston had always wanted to direct a movie from horseback. . . .'') and his list of Bogart's films, which are divided into four categories: Best, Important, Good, and Poor. In addition, there is ample film analysis (``Casablanca transcends its absurdities''), but little revelatory to readers familiar with the usual critical suspects. Still, the book succeeds at conveying Bogart's enduring strength as a star, a figure who, 40 years after his death, remains culturally and aesthetically alive. A refreshingly serious film biography that movie lovers will appreciate for approaching Bogart as a subject, not a celebrity. (49 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 18, 1997
ISBN: 0-395-77399-7
Page Count: 367
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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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