A long-neglected pioneer of live TV drama is appropriately praised but not brought to life in this biography by a contributing editor to Emmy magazine. Krampner ably interweaves the stories of Coe's rise in television and the growth of live TV drama in the 1940s and '50s, demonstrating Coe's crucial role in the flowering of that form. It needed both Coe's eye for acting talent (bringing young Grace Kelly and James Dean to TV) and his ability to attract and edit fine writers to produce enduring dramas like The Trip to Bountiful, The Days of Wine and Roses, and Marty, and the understated comedy Mr. Peepers. With the demise of live TV, Coe turned to producing Broadway successes like A Thousand Clowns. But after withdrawing from one of these (Fiddler on the Roof) he began to decline. Some successes, more failures, and serious drinking followed, until his death in 1979. All of Coe's artistic accomplishments serve his contention that ``there's nothing duller than rich people!,'' which became the driving force behind his trademark kitchen-sink dramas. Keys to his inner life are more elusive, however, despite accounts of his failed marriages and his father's early death. Some of the author's conclusions are also unconvincing. Though Coe lacks the cachet of other early TV luminaries, it is untrue that ``today, Fred Coe is forgotten.'' He lives on in the works of those he nurtured—Paddy Chayefsky, Horton Foote, Delbert Mann, and others- -and in TV's continued ability to succeed in the domestic drama. Coe's life may be sad, but it is not—as Krampner labels it— tragic, at least not as presented here. Similarly, comparisons to underappreciated filmmaker D.W. Griffith, which Krampner makes throughout the book, do not fully ring true. As the only sustained resource on Coe, this book is useful to media scholars, but as dramatic reading, it wants the poetic humanity of Coe's works. (20 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8135-2359-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Rutgers Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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