The author vacillates between theory-lite, barstool pontification and biography—but his book is sure to delight hardcore...
Prolific novelist Charyn (The Green Lantern, 2005, etc.) meditates on the life and work thus far of the controversial film auteur.
A motor-mouthed goofball, Quentin Tarantino mythologized his childhood, spinning tales of a half-Native-American hippie mother and vagabond existence. Charyn gets the real story from Mama Tarantino herself. Raised in a Los Angeles suburb as much by television and comic books as by his young, single mother, the boy was unfocused in school and dropped out at age 16. He found his Xanadu working at the now-storied Video Archives in Manhattan Beach. The “Archive Dogs,” over whom Tarantino ruled, created a makeshift film school, watching and discussing movies near-constantly. Here, Tarantino penned his breakthrough film, Reservoir Dogs, and met Roger Avary, with whom he would later share the Oscar for their Pulp Fiction screenplay. Charyn briefly chronicles these auspicious beginnings, combining biography with three streams of tangents: responses to critics’ readings of Tarantino’s work; his own readings, complete with scene analyses; and background (sprinkled with pop psychology) on Tarantino’s posse of collaborators. He sticks with this unfocused formula to explore Pulp Fiction’s runaway success and Tarantino’s subsequent three films, ending with musings on his subject’s past and future. The book is spotty and tries to be too many things at once. Still, Charyn, who teaches film part-time at the American University in Paris, has strong ideas, particularly about Tarantino’s conflation of humor and violence, and about the void that, paradoxically, forms the core of his not-so-empty cinema. Charyn successfully depicts Tarantino as a multifaceted character: an actor who has written his own perpetual role as a film director; the reincarnation of Orson Welles, with additional media savvy; a baby in a giant’s body; and an egotistical artist in possession of an odd sort of brilliance.
The author vacillates between theory-lite, barstool pontification and biography—but his book is sure to delight hardcore fans, students of Postmodern Cinema and the subject himself.Pub Date: June 10, 2006
ISBN: 1-56025-858-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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