A merely proficient biography of the master director of such Surrealist classics as Un Chien Andalou and Belle de Jour. Like many early directors, Bu§uel stumbled into the film-making business. He left his native Spain for a putative Parisian diplomatic posting with an offshoot of the League of Nations. While waiting for an assignment, he began to work in a variety of capacities on film sets and as a film critic. At the same time, he was drawn to the Surrealist movement. Desperate for a career, he borrowed money from his mother, and together with Salvador Dal° made the short film Un Chien Andalou. With its dreamy eroticism, its shocking violence (most memorably epitomized in a shot of an eye being sliced with a razor), it was an enormous success, as was his next, equally controversial film L’Age D’Or. Beyond the shock value, there was a strongly considered—though often fetishistic—aesthetic at work. Octavio Paz noted that Bu§uel’s films balanced “ferocity and lyricism, a world of dreams and blood” with a “bare, spare style that is not at all Baroque and results in a sort of exaggerated sobriety.” Despite his notoriety, Bu§uel made almost no more films for the next ten years. The Spanish Civil War sent him into exile, first in Hollywood and then in Mexico, where, eventually, he was able to get work directing low-budget films. From their relative success, he was able to rebuild his career and to gain international acclaim. Unlike many directors whose late work is largely disappointing, Bu§uel enjoyed a great final flowering in his 70s when he produced three masterpieces in a row, including That Obscure Object of Desire, his final film. Veteran film biographer Baxter (Steven Spielberg, 1997, etc.) does a thoroughly competent job, but his writing is uninspired, and his research lacks a fulfilling depth. Not a tour de force but still a useful primer. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7867-0506-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
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