Sheer heaven for movie buffs.
Superb bio of the high living, larger-than-life film producer, spellbindingly detailed by Harper’s Bazaar European editor Fraser-Cavassoni.
The author, who in 1982 worked as an assistant on Sam Spiegel’s production of Betrayal (written by her stepfather, Harold Pinter), was so intrigued by his flamboyant personality and reticence about his past that she made it her business to track down his origins. Born in western Galicia (now southeastern Poland) in 1901, Spiegel preferred to gloss over his humble Jewish roots; when asked his birthplace, he’d usually name Vienna. (In fact, he had attended the University of Vienna.) He emigrated to Palestine, married, and seven years later abandoned wife and daughter to sail for San Francisco. He returned to Berlin and Vienna to cut his producing teeth on several films and in 1939 came back to the US, hitting his stride a few years later as producer of Tales of Manhattan in 1942 and Orson Welles’s The Stranger in 1946. At one point, Spiegel had so many creditors that he changed his name to S.P. Eagle. Still, though, often penniless, he gave fantastic parties—his New Year’s Eve bashes were legendary—attended by all the big stars and directors. He produced many of the classic films of the 1950s and ’60s: The African Queen, On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, etc. He also infuriated three wives with his penchant for young girls, top fashion models, young actresses, and high-class prostitutes; he was known to interrupt business meetings to arrange his sex life. Meanwhile, his relentless methods and empty promises as a producer prompted Hollywood to invent the words “Spiegelese” and “to Spiegel.” A sublime cast of characters—John Huston, David Lean, Marlon Brando, Peter O’Toole, Faye Dunaway, Bogey and Bacall, Warren Beatty, Mike Nichols, Elia Kazan—adds to the fun. It even seems right that Spiegel died on New Year’s Eve in 1985.
Sheer heaven for movie buffs.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-684-83619-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
