A fascinating, informative, skillfully articulated narrative of one of the forgotten figures in cinematic history.
The story of a pioneer in motion-picture making and his mysterious disappearance.
In this combination of “a ghost story, a family saga, and an unsolved mystery,” Fischer, an author and film producer, introduces us to relatively obscure 19th-century artist and inventor Louis Le Prince, a Frenchman whose career prompted him to relocate to England and the U.S. Fascinated by photography and the manipulation of recorded images, Le Prince made extraordinary advancements in cinematography and is now credited by some historians, including Fischer, as having created the first true motion pictures in the late 1880s. His suspicious disappearance in 1890, shortly before he was to unveil his revolutionary single-lens camera, allowed rival inventions to supersede his invention. This meant that other innovators, such as the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, and Thomas Edison, the so-called “Wizard of Menlo Park,” got credit as the most important trailblazers in the field. Fischer’s sketch of the historical context in which Le Prince worked—“at the end of a century when humankind had already domesticated space, light, and time”—is consistently entertaining and illuminating. The author vividly renders the personalities and science involved in the production of early cinema, and he lucidly explains the complex technological challenges and breakthroughs. Particularly insightful are Fischer’s interpretations of the likely motivations of Le Prince and his assistants as they attempted, under frequent financial duress, to complete a workable prototype of their camera and secure international patent protections. Also intriguing is the book’s contribution to the ongoing demythologization of cultural icon Edison, who seems to have routinely schemed his way into taking credit for the work of others. Though Fischer’s ultimate conclusion about the circumstances behind Le Prince’s death remains speculative, he offers and defends a plausible version of events that draws persuasively on extant historical evidence.
A fascinating, informative, skillfully articulated narrative of one of the forgotten figures in cinematic history.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982114-82-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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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