A gripping portrait of a difficult talent.
Film historian Biskind (Gods and Monsters: Movers, Shakers, and Other Casualties of the Hollywood Machine, 2004, etc.) examines the eventful life and career of Warren Beatty, one of Hollywood’s last exemplars of old-school glamour and, evidently, as maddening an individual as ever graced the silver screen.
The author eschews delving into Beatty’s early life, beginning his narrative with the tyro’s early acting roles in theater and live television, when the actor established the twin poles of his persona—the intractable artiste and compulsive seducer of women. Restless, intelligent and secretive, Beatty wielded his charm and beauty as a weapon, using his skills in seduction to manipulate his way into stardom despite a difficult reputation and multiple flops, leaving a bloody trail of broken hearts and damaged careers in his wake. His romances with the likes of Joan Collins, Leslie Caron, Natalie Wood, Diane Keaton and Madonna echo the pattern of relationships with screenwriters including Robert Towne, James Toback and Elaine May: Beatty would charm, overwhelm and drain the object of his attentions, ruthlessly move on when it suited his agenda and yet maintain good relations down the line. Beatty’s parallel career as a political agitator bore the hallmarks of his film work—compromised by indecisiveness and ego. Biskind brings his historian’s acumen to bear on the production of era-defining triumphs like Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Shampoo (1975) and Reds (1981), as well as notorious flops like Ishtar (1987), Love Affair (1994) and Town & Country (2001), and his accounts are full of juicy gossip and intriguing insights into the actor’s psychology. As a producer and director, Beatty demonstrated a compulsive nature bordering on psychosis, demanding endless takes and micromanaging insignificant details that drove his projects wildly over schedule and budget and threatened the studios that backed them.
A gripping portrait of a difficult talent.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7432-4658-3
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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.
