Warmblooded memoir by Americanized Czech filmmaker Forman, whose world went into turnaround when he decided to leave Communist Prague for capitalist Hollywood. Forman's childhood in wartime Czechoslovakia was spent not upsetting the adults who cared for him once his parents had been killed by the Nazis. His young manhood among drunken filmmakers and humorless state-controlled film czars, as he rose from writer to director, is drawn skillfully here, as are his first two marriages, the impossibility of finding an apartment, and the need for the new couple to live for three years in his office. Stories of deranged Czech life take up half the book, focusing on the making of Forman's first two documentary-styled films, Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Fireman's Ball, which feature nonactors working with real actors. This mix became essential to Forman's spirit, and when he later filmed such Hollywood works as Hair and Ragtime, he filled them largely with unknowns. Even when Forman landed Jack Nicholson for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, he filled the film's mental wards with unknowns and nonactors to help him keep a grip on the real world. As time passed, he found that he was locked into making historical films (Amadeus, Valmont, Ragtime) and that even Cuckoo's Nest was a psychoanalytic period piece based on outmoded lobotomies. What's more, these enclosed worlds, with free spirits and geniuses drowning amid mediocrities, mirrored his earliest experiences under the Nazis and then the Communists. The book's highlight is Forman's return to Prague as an Oscar-winning capitalist to film Amadeus amid the bugs and informers of state security. And the winner is...Milos Forman—and his coauthor, Prague novelist Jan Novak. (B&w photo insert—not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40063-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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
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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