For Clueless obsessives—and perhaps Jane Austen fans.
The legacy of the 1995 movie described as "a Rodeo Drive version of Jane Austen's Emma.”
Pop-culture journalist Chaney, a former staff writer for the Washington Post, examines the enduring popularity of the teen comedy Clueless, written and directed by Amy Heckerling. The movie is an update of Austen's 1815 comedy of manners about a spoiled, self-assured matchmaker. Chaney’s interview subjects, who include the film’s producers, filmmakers, designers, actors, and artists, repeatedly "express[ed] feelings often bathed in warmth and nostalgia for a time that not only shaped their careers but, on many days, was just a joy.” Many of the contributors coo over star Alicia Silverstone's adorable nature—e.g., associate producer Twink Caplan: "she was so pure, Alicia, so sweet and just a joy, just really a joy, you know.” The tell-all aspect of the book consists of saccharine and tedious accounts about how it was "a happy movie to watch and…a largely happy movie to make as well” and how the set was “a harmonious, low-key environment.” As composer David Kitay notes, “it was just this awesome haze of fun.” Later, Chaney argues weakly for "The Impact of Clueless" since the movie's release—though “the virgin who can’t drive” remains timeless—and she oversteps in her claim that it demonstrates how women in the early 21st century are disciples of protagonist Cher Horowitz. The author focuses more on the movie's influence on fashion and language than her subchapter titled "The Impact of Clueless on: Girl Power and Progressiveness" would suggest. Her position that Clueless was a culturally significant movie with an enduring legacy is more fitting for Heckerling—who proved the Hollywood naysayers wrong about the film's marketability, eventually selling it to Scott Rudin—and the resourceful and assertive women in media and academia who followed her.
For Clueless obsessives—and perhaps Jane Austen fans.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9908-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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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