There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but compleatist fans of Wayne and Ford will enjoy revisiting the films discussed.
Biography of the two figures, actor and director, who defined the Western film genre.
John Wayne (1907-1979) started in film, as Schoenberger (English and Creative Writing/Coll. of William and Mary; Dangerous Muse: A Life of Caroline Blackwood, 2001, etc.) observes, as a “mere stagehand.” However, by the time director John Ford (1894-1973) caught up to him, he had already made a few small films as a lead or supporting actor—unsuccessfully, to be sure. Tyrannical and exacting—and, the author posits late in the book, tied up in knots by sexual-identity insecurity—Ford led Wayne to stardom through seven major Westerns, including Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, that are held up today as canonical. Ford’s contributions were many. Apart from the technical aspects of his directorial work, he also had a nuanced sense of storytelling and of the grays between the black and white edges of morality that made his films more interesting than those Wayne made on his own, such as the simple-minded epics The Green Berets and The Alamo, “derailed by his ultrapatriotism,” Schoenberger remarks while enumerating the masculine-virtue qualities Ford helped Wayne express. “No other director and actor created the ideal of the American hero more than Ford and Wayne,” writes the author, going on to illustrate her case with those major films while noting other waypoints in Wayne’s career, such as Mark Rydell’s The Cowboys and Don Siegel’s The Shootist—both films in which Wayne’s character dies, something contemporary audiences didn’t much care for. Allowing that she is “not alone among women” in enjoying Westerns, Schoenberger serves up an intelligently crafted narrative that never runs as deep as it might. For that, readers are better served by Scott Eyman’s John Wayne (2013) and especially Glenn Frankel’s The Searchers (2014), the latter of which covers much of the same ground more compellingly.
There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but compleatist fans of Wayne and Ford will enjoy revisiting the films discussed.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53485-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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