An engrossing, comprehensive book that gives invaluable insight into the life and work of a truly original artist.
The expansive oral biography a great American director.
Zuckoff (Journalism/Univ. of Boston; Ponzi’s Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend, 2005, etc.) begins with Altman’s childhood in Kansas City, his first two brief marriages and his struggle to become established in Hollywood. Recollections from his sisters and ex-wives paint the director as a hard-living, immensely likable character with grand ambition. During his many years directing television, Altman met his third wife and lifelong companion, Kathryn Reed Altman, whose contributions to this volume are substantial and forthright. Altman directed a wide variety of films in his long career, and each theatrical picture is represented here by at least one substantial passage or archived review. The major works—M*A*S*H (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Nashville (1975), The Player (1992) and Short Cuts (1993)—receive their own chapters, which chronicle the beginnings, production and reception of each film. Nearly all of this material is of great interest to movie buffs, but certain passages stand out—the disagreements between Altman and Warren Beatty over McCabe; the production fiasco of Popeye (1980) on the island of Malta; the director’s critical rebirth with The Player, told from the perspective of its star, Tim Robbins. Altman was known as a director beloved by his actors, and an abundance of rhapsodic anecdotes from the likes of Paul Newman, Elliot Gould and Cher reinforce this reputation. Conversely, an often-neglected family and a litany of wronged producers and screenwriters amply represent his cruel side. Due to the sheer number of contributors, several of these accounts, particularly those regarding the director’s financial problems, bear marked similarities that can become tiresome. But Zuckoff’s portrait is multifaceted and fully realized, giving the reader a clear view into Altman’s firebrand persona.
An engrossing, comprehensive book that gives invaluable insight into the life and work of a truly original artist.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-26768-9
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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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