A diverting though superficial insider’s account.
Brief memoir of the Oscar-winning producer’s half-century in the British and American film industries.
Deeley helped produce some landmark movies, including The Deer Hunter (1978), which netted him an Academy Award for Best Picture, and the influential, visually stunning SF classic Blade Runner (1982). He also produced such lesser-known ’60s and ’70s gems as British heist film The Italian Job, the David Bowie–starring The Man Who Fell to Earth and the Sam Peckinpah–directed Convoy. Deeley started out in his native England in the early ’50s, rising from a job earning £7.50 per week as an assistant editor to the position of independent producer. The book’s first half, detailing his memories of Britain’s low-budget moviemaking system, will likely be the most revelatory for American film buffs. The recollections that follow, about The Deer Hunter, Blade Runner and other Hollywood productions, are somewhat less satisfying, due in part to their brevity, but also to Deeley’s reluctance to dish any dirt on the volatile characters he’s dealt with over the years. He tells a few tales about the notoriously hard-drinking Peckinpah, who could be brutal to his casts and crews, and about difficult Deer Hunter director Michael Cimino, but film enthusiasts will probably have seen better stories elsewhere. (Cimino in particular was much more memorably profiled in Steven Bach’s 1985 classic, Final Cut.) Nonetheless, the book provides some amusing moments. When Steven Spielberg came to see star Harrison Ford on the set of Blade Runner, Deeley didn’t recognize the director and ignored him, which subsequently created tension with the prickly Ford.
A diverting though superficial insider’s account.Pub Date: April 22, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60598-038-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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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