An annoying, superficial, and spiteful reductionist biography of the late Italian filmmaker. Baxter (The Hollywood Exiles, 1976) is more intent on dashing the self-promulgated ``myth'' of Fellini (192093) than on the assemblage of a creditable life story. Presented a Lifetime Achievement Oscar shortly before he died, the Italian director was a consistent prize winner in Hollywood, at Cannes, and elsewhere with such landmark films as La Strada (1954), Nights of Cabiria (1957), La Dolce Vita (1960), 8´ (1963), and Amarcord (1973). Baxter provides detailed synopses of most of the films and delves into such background material as the development of the screenplays, casting, and selection of the crew. He discusses Fellini's childhood in Rimini and youth in Rome; his early exposure to cinema and some of his influences; his career as a cartoonist/journalist; his 50-year marriage to actress Giulietta Masina (``a relationship,'' Baxter claims, ``more like brother and sister''), and his supposed jealousy of and resistance to her emerging stardom following La Strada and Cabiria; his lordly treatment of those who worked for him; and his tumultuous association with producer Dino de Laurentiis. The author also catalogues, with little amplification and plenty of innuendo, ``a parade of sexually charged images'' from Fellini's childhood and dreams, which often became manifest in his films. Throughout, there is a persistent, pointless sniping. Baxter hints that Fellini bribed his high school teachers. We learn that he didn't really run away with the circus. He notes that as a 1930s schoolboy Fellini was photographed ``smartly turned out'' in his youth group uniform, implying that this somehow negated his adult anti-fascist beliefs. Baxter goes to great lengths to point out that Fellini's distant father, dominant mother, and ``a sensitive, creative disposition'' are ``often associated with homosexuality, but there's no evidence of physical affairs.'' Utterly lacking in artistry or insight—an unbearably long, trashy tabloid article. (24 pages of b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11273-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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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