An entertaining picture of a complicated cinema icon, albeit viewed through rose-colored glasses.
A new biography attempts to understand the many sides of one of the 20th century’s most famous actors.
Charlton Heston (1923-2008) was a man of contradictions. The 1960s activist who fought to convince studios to make more films in the United States is the same actor whose most profitable pictures, including The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur, and El Cid, were shot overseas. Eliot (American Titan: Searching for John Wayne, 2014, etc.), biographer of such Hollywood conservatives as Ronald Reagan, Clint Eastwood, and Cary Grant, shows how Heston, a one-time Democrat who marched in the earliest civil rights protests and fought to preserve public funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, became a Nixon supporter who detested the “Woodstock-flavored counterculture that wanted to blame the soldiers” for the Vietnam War and, most notoriously, became the president of the National Rifle Association. Eliot writes insightfully about Heston’s acting. “Heston’s interpretations rarely went beneath the surface” of his characters, a style that nonetheless worked well in costume dramas such as The Greatest Show on Earth and later sci-fi films such as Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green. The prose is workmanlike throughout, however, and the book is hagiographic: Eliot criticizes the lesser films—Julius Caesar, The Hawaiians, The Call of the Wild—but not Heston, except to acknowledge that he “remained weakest in the romance department in his films” and that his late-life politics cost him acting jobs. Still, readers will enjoy the many inside-Hollywood anecdotes, such as Heston chatting with the Ten Commandments crew about “what he imagined Moses’s sex life might have been like” and the director, Cecil B. DeMille, finding the editing of the film “a surgical chore” when he discovered that some of the extras in the orgy scene were “behaving a little too much like true Method actors, blurring the line between acting and real life.”
An entertaining picture of a complicated cinema icon, albeit viewed through rose-colored glasses.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-242043-5
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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