Die-hard Bond fans will delight in this compendium.
An oral history of six decades’ worth of entries in the James Bond film franchise.
For some fans, James Bond is Sean Connery, who turns up here at the last moment to mutter, “Of course the films will go on, but who’ll play me, I just don’t know and can’t guess.” Others are perfectly happy with the work of Daniel Craig, who lacks Connery’s twinkle but has nicely captured the character’s essential amorality: He’s perfectly capable of mayhem and extreme violence without pausing for a breath (and doesn’t really need to, the Bond of today having lightened up on the cigarettes and booze of his 1960s iteration). Besides, he looks good in a tux. Altman, the co-author, with Gross, of like-minded oral histories of Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Battlestar Galactica, talks to figures before and behind the camera to chronicle the changing face of Bond and the Bond films—including the “Bond girls,” some lethal and some merely eye candy. The compilers don’t always hit the mark: It does little perceptible good to know that Robert Rodriguez was introduced to Bond through The Spy Who Loved Me or to repeat the well-worn truism that Ian Fleming named his spy after the author of a book about Caribbean birds. But there’s plenty of meat on the bones, too, such as the authors’ exploration of the pioneering work of Bond’s early producers in product placements, with Dr. No sporting more than 20 of them as “a result of James Bond and Sean Connery being fairly unknown entities” at the time. Pierce Brosnan, George Lazenby, and Timothy Dalton weren’t much better known. However, along with Roger Moore and Craig, all, note the authors in a rare criticism, have done their part to play Bond as Fleming wrote him, “a sexist, misogynist dinosaur who is always ready to do what’s right for England and the world.”
Die-hard Bond fans will delight in this compendium.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-30095-9
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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