A nice companion piece to Harryhausen’s autobiography, An Animated Life (2004).
A collection of drawings, storyboards and photographs of models crafted by the stop-motion animation expert.
Billed as “cinema’s greatest master of fantasy” in an appreciative preface by Lord of the Rings director/King Kong remaker Peter Jackson, Harryhausen was already making puppets in junior high, shooting short animated films in his late teens. (Mom made the costumes and Dad built the sets for his early efforts.) He apprenticed with Willis O’Brien, legendary animator of the original King Kong, but after WWII found ways to adapt Obie’s expensive techniques to the lower-budget films that were becoming the fantasy norm. His brief but informative text frequently notes compromises made to reduce costs: Cerberus having two heads instead of three, photos used instead of hand-painted backdrops for Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and One Million Years B.C. Wistful references to never-made projects, including War of the Worlds and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, remind readers how often a movie artist’s dreams go unrealized. Harryhausen had a better track record than most, partly because he knew how to sell an idea; many of the dramatic charcoal and pencil drawings handsomely reproduced here were created for pitch sessions with the money men. Though drawings predominate, fans will particularly relish the less frequent color photos of the intricate models—usually latex rubber covering a metal armature, supplemented by a few bronze casts—of Harryhausen’s most famous monsters: the snaky Medusa in Clash of the Titans, the many-armed Kali and the giant Cyclops from two of the Sinbad movies, the hydra and the amazing skeleton warriors in Jason and the Argonauts. The organization is thematic rather than chronological, putting all the aliens in one chapter, dinosaurs in another; a marvelous section entitled “Masks, Mayhem & Monsters” features a hilariously creepy photo of 21-year-old Harryhausen, wearing a Mr. Hyde mask he designed himself, flanked by a heavily made-up girlfriend with a rope around her neck.
A nice companion piece to Harryhausen’s autobiography, An Animated Life (2004).Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-8230-8400-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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
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