A comprehensive look at Chaplin the man but lacking as a portrait of the artist and his legacy.
The life of a great filmmaker and lousy human being.
Ackroyd (Three Brothers, 2014, etc.) delivers a thorough if ultimately unsatisfying portrait of Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977) in this dispiriting chronicle of an artistic genius and thoroughly unpleasant man. The author’s account of Chaplin’s difficult early life in the slums of London is evocative and moving, detailing the many deprivations suffered by the young Charlie, which included chronic malnutrition and stints in workhouses; more troubling still was the condition of his mother, a failed singer whose devolution into madness ensured a lifelong lack of emotional stability for her gifted son. Surprisingly, the narrative becomes less interesting as Chaplin achieves success and renown, as his background in mime, dance and acrobatic clowning coincided with the nascent demands of early film comedy. Chaplin’s physical gifts and iconic visual presence as his signature “Little Tramp” character quickly established him as Hollywood’s biggest attraction, and his subsequent total control over his projects resulted in phenomenally successful movies (including City Lights, Modern Times and The Great Dictator) that made him the most famous man in the world. Ackroyd’s analysis of Chaplin’s evolving screen persona and obsessive attention to details provides some intriguing insights into his many classic works, but the author neglects to place these films in a wider context. The man himself emerges as a bitter, hateful presence: cruel, sadistic, bullying, a sexual predator fixated on very young teenage girls and monomaniacal to the point of monstrosity. Readers are left with an understanding of Chaplin’s background, the biographical details of his long and troubled life, and some idea of the hellish conditions on the exacting filmmaker’s sets, but conclusions about his significance as an artist, his work’s relationship to the culture at large, and the internal forces that engendered such personal misery and creative transcendence fail to cohere.
A comprehensive look at Chaplin the man but lacking as a portrait of the artist and his legacy.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0385537377
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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
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