If the Girl Scout troops of Beverly Hills need an illuminating manual for their Fundamentals of Successful Producing merit badge, this is it. And they can also use it as an object of meditation. In the late '70s, Obst left a good job as an editor at the New York Times Magazine to accompany her husband to L.A. This is her articulate memoir about the road to big-time Hollywood success (having started as mogul Peter Guber's ``d,'' for development girl, Obst produced Sleepless in Seattle and is finishing One Fine Day with Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney). Obst lifts the discussion into the realm of Zen, physics, metaphysics, psychoanalysis, Kant, and evolutionary science (e.g., ``The velocity of change is so staggering it creates a kind of turbo-Darwinism, a revved-up struggle for survival in which one must constantly mutate to survive''). She's used every sort of philosophy, cosmology, spirituality, and professional connection, as well as the kitchen-sink advice of her Jewish mother, to ``narrate the chaos'' of Hollywood and to get her films produced. But happily, despite her industry reputation for toughness (Buzz magazine voted her one of Hollywood's biggest bullies), she quite generously mentors a new generation with this little gem about how to be a Girl Producer. She gives specific instructions about gaining entree, pitching a script (``Before the segue into the pitch, the producer has to prep the room. We do this by talking about the spouse, the boy/girlfriend or lack thereof, Gymboree, yoga, diets, the playoffs . . . any playoff will do''). She talks about professional agendas (``Never go to a meeting without a strategy''), making alliances, talking to stars. Though this isn't a feminist tract, except in the broadest and best sense, Obst celebrates the new phenomenon of ``chix in flix,'' women with lots and lots of power (and husbands). An up-close chance to meet a tough cookie who loves being a pro—and who probably wouldn't take your calls.
Pub Date: Sept. 4, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-62211-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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