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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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