Best for undiscriminating movie fanatics.
A colorful movie life in a monochrome biography.
If the name of Merian C. Cooper doesn’t ring a bell, his most famous creation certainly will: he was the driving force behind King Kong. But that was just one of many peaks in a life rich with adventure and drama. Cooper was a WWI pilot; a mercenary for the Polish Air Force; a Russian POW during the brief Soviet-Poland war of 1920 (he bolted in a daring escape across enemy lines); a filmmaker who shot groundbreaking features in Abyssinia, Persia and Siam (today’s Ethiopia, Iran and Thailand); an aide to General Claire Chennault during WWII; and the man who changed the face of movies through his production of 1935’s Technicolor feature Becky Sharp and 1952’s widescreen epic This is Cinerama. Yet for a man who may have had a larger-than-life existence, Cooper comes through in this quotidian biography as a fairly enigmatic and elusive figure. Vaz (The Art of the Incredibles, 2004, etc.), a frequent contributor to Cinefex magazine, brushes over unsavory aspects of his personality, most notably his failure to embrace an illegitimate son he left in Poland, and he doesn’t examine the creative process that went into his groundbreaking work (Becky Sharp gets just two paragraphs). The soul of the man is conspicuously absent—we learn what he made but never what inspired him to it. Cooper’s career, in fact, was rooted in collaborative efforts. Early projects were co-helmed with Ernest C. Schoedsack, and it’s doubtful King Kong would have come to life without the special effects of Willis O’Brien or the driving force of producer David O. Selznick (who later burned the sets to show the incineration of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind). Cooper’s later projects were also strictly collaborative: he co-produced with John Ford (most notably The Searchers), and This is Cinerama was fueled by Fred Waller’s technical innovations and Mike Todd’s showmanship. Perhaps Cooper’s success came from knowing who to team with.
Best for undiscriminating movie fanatics.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6276-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
