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
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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