The inflated title of this readable narrative nicely captures the bloated egos everywhere on a display in the Hollywood of the 1980s. It's a saga of art and commerce that Lewis illustrates with the rise and fall of Francis Coppola's moviemaking career. Lewis (English/Oregon State Univ.), of course, sides with Coppola as a brilliant auteur constantly in battle with capitalist vulgarians and dim-witted critics. After the successes of the Godfather films and Apocalypse Now—which is where this book begins—Coppola held most of the marbles. And his ambition led him to create Zoetrope Studios, a means for controlling the production and distribution of his future movies. But Lewis fails to see that Coppola's grandiose remarks, his creative hubris, his contempt for mass audiences, all backed him into the overpriced exercises that he directed in the '80s, most notoriously One From the Heart. Relying on industry publications (and no new primary research), Lewis documents the elaborate efforts to finance Coppola's films. But the heart of the drama is the failure of Zoetrope, which Lewis blames on the collusion of the big six studios who felt threatened by the feisty newcomer. The arrogant Coppola hocked the house on One From the Heart, a self-indulgent bit of whimsy that Lewis considers ``terrific...because of all its confusion.'' He faults Hollywood for its understandable later efforts to reign in the once-bankable genius. Coppola's spotty record from the late '80s (Rumble Fish, The Cotton Club, etc.) resulted, in Lewis's view, from his humiliating need to compromise with the moneymen. Lewis only hints at the more intriguing story here—that the prerelease hype on movies is increasingly more important than the films themselves. Not a hard-hitting investigation, Lewis's academic study isn't too strong on critical insight, either. But it's a compelling tale, nonetheless, told jargon-free.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8223-1602-1
Page Count: 185
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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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