The indefatigably prolific Meyers (Bogart: A Life in Hollywood, 1997, etc.) continues to work his way through the major icons of American film. Gary Cooper didn’t set out to be an actor. Given a choice, he would have preferred to be a painter in the mold of the great western artist Charles Russell. But he was born into the roles in which he became best known, a lanky, laconic westerner, son of English parents living in Montana, raised on a ranch but educated (albeit briefly) in England. He fell into film acting more or less by accident, taking extra and stunt work while living with his family in Hollywood in the mid-1920s, replacing a missing actor on a silent western and revealing an affinity for the camera. His rise was stunningly fast, so much so that in 1931 he suffered a nervous breakdown. When he returned after a few months— rest, he became bigger than ever. What is forgotten about Cooper is that his best work was not in westerns (or his equally famous pair of Frank Capra films, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Meet John Doe) but, rather, in the more rarified world of romantic comedy, particularly in an unlikely but highly successful series of collaborations with the urbane Ernst Lubitsch (Design for Living, Desire), Howard Hawks (Ball of Fire) and Billy Wilder (Love in the Afternoon), and romantic dramas like A Farewell to Arms. Meyers seems more interested in recounting Coop’s numerous sexual conquests—his tempestuous affair with Lupe Velez, his several marriages and various dalliances—than in the films, and his critical judgment is unexceptional. Frankly, he has little of interest to say about the films, and when he attempts to generalize (as in a lengthy peroration on the role of the 1929 version of The Virginian in shaping the film western), his statements are riddled with clichÇs and inaccuracies. The book’s lifeless prose suggests great haste and no small lack of interest. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-15494-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
