A likely definitive exploration of the director’s distinguished career—of great interest to budding filmmakers and film...
A well-grounded biography of the American director’s expansive career.
Throughout a prolific career, Sidney Lumet (1924-2011) emerged as one of the most acclaimed directors of his time, recognized for his accomplishments in theater, TV, and, especially, film (Twelve Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, etc.). In this first significant biography of Lumet, Spiegel (Literature and Film/Columbia Univ.; co-author: The Breast Book: An Intimate and Curious History, 2002, etc.) offers a comprehensive study of this multifaceted filmmaker, thoughtfully examining the creative and personal forces that influenced his work. The author traces his early years as a child actor performing in Yiddish theater at age 5 through his work on Broadway as a teenager and his enlistment in the Army during World War II. After the war, Lumet’s interest quickly shifted from acting to directing for the theater. In the early days of TV, he firmly hit his stride, mastering the quickly evolving technical craft of directing for live TV, which included directing diverse groups of actors while remaining mindfully efficient with tight schedules and budgets. These skills would benefit his later work on film. Spiegel comfortably weaves elements of Lumet’s personal life into her narrative, touching on his complex relationship with his father, Baruch, also a theater actor in his day; his four marriages (Gloria Vanderbilt was his second wife); two children; and his expansive network of show business friends. Yet the author shines brightest in her illumination of Lumet’s skills as a director. Beyond offering knowledgeable film summaries, she deftly examines the technical artistry he brought to each project. “Sidney never stopped experimenting,” writes Spiegel. “He was constantly working with new actors, new equipment, new genres, and new techniques. Throughout his career he drew upon his earlier experiences in radio, theater, television, and film to expand beyond his comfort zones and break new ground as both an artist and a citizen.”
A likely definitive exploration of the director’s distinguished career—of great interest to budding filmmakers and film enthusiasts.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-03015-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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