The second half of Powell's autobiography, like the first, shows the British filmmaker to be an exceptionally fine writer. Powell takes up the story where the first volume (A Life in Movies, 1987) left off, just after Powell and his partner, screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, had reached the top of the British film heap with The Red Shoes in 1948. In the second volume, sadly, things begin to fall apart for the Archers (as their film company was called). Unpleasant, even disastrous, involvement with Hollywood producers Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick result in a string of flops. Although they recoup with the enormous commercial success of The Battle of the River Plate (1956), the partnership dissolves. Powell goes on to make Peeping Tom (1959), a masterpiece that enrages the critics with its violence, scaring the distributor into virtually suppressing the film. Powell goes to Australia, where he makes two successful films and jump-starts a moribund film industry. After that, however, the book becomes a depressing catalogue of projects not realized as onetime friends shun a filmmaker who they feel has grown too old to employ. As in the first book, Powell offers splendidly vivid descriptive writing, ruthlessly honest self-evaluations, and generous and evocative portraits of famous men and women as varied as Frederick Ashton, Alexander Korda, Thomas Beecham, Jennifer Jones, and Selznick. Unfortunately, Powell died after completing the first draft of the book and his widow, film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, appears to have been reluctant to allow much tampering with his final work. As a result, the book occasionally rambles and sometimes reads like transcribed dictation (which much of it is). On the other hand, some of Powell's digressions are as fascinating as the story from which they divert us. A book of charm and panache, this is a lovely legacy. (24 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 5, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43443-7
Page Count: 612
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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
PERSPECTIVES
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