Tiptop film writing and a bathyspheric exploration of the complex emotional depths of a great actor. Chutkow writes on French film for The New York Times and Vogue. He spent three years interviewing and researching Gerard Depardieu (b. 1948) for this bio which, although it has the subject's input, has not been vetted by him. Though essentially about the raging genius and vast appetites of Depardieu, who by midcareer has made 80 films, this is also among the best books ever written about film acting. Few will be unmoved by Chutkow's emotional charting of young Gerard's speech problems as a seemingly retarded peasant child unable to talk without stuttering and given to long silences. Equally affecting are the accounts of his hard times at school, his youth spent racing about hellbent, his quitting school at 13 and leaving tiny Chateauroux for Paris at 16, where after two years he hulks into an acting class for which he is totally unfitted—aside from his hunger to learn. Soon a doctor finds that Gerard has a hearing impairment which affects both speech and understanding. This doctor and another, and Gerard's new wife, Elisabeth, who is both an actress and a psychologist seven years his senior, train him to read and speak. He becomes a force in his acting class and a torrential speaker, falls into films and finds himself launched on an atomic career, first playing thugs and lowlifes, then more sophisticated bourgeois, winning awards and at last filming Cyrano de Bergerac in Rostand's alexandrines, followed by his huge fit into the role of Columbus for Ridley Scott's 1492. He never researches but rather joins his skin to a character's emotional being. ``My life demands a power of perpetual adaptation,'' says Depardieu, who also rises above a deeply wounding canard by Time magazine which charged him with being a nine-year-old rapist. Much, much more—a descent into the maelstrom not to be missed. (Forty-eight b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: March 18, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40943-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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
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