Intoxicating and informative, a personal glimpse at one of the masters of cinema that will appeal to casual readers and...
Meticulously detailed biography of the renowned filmmaker, from his early days as a critic to success as director of such classic French New Wave films as Contempt and Alphaville.
Born in 1930, art-school reject Godard spent the immediate postwar years watching every movie he possibly could, mostly at the Cinémathèque in Paris. He became a teenage critic for Cahiers du cinéma, where he honed his attention to detail and ultimately crafted the theory that would become the basis of his own films: What happens on screen is connected to what occurs in everyday life. The moderate success of a short movie shot in Geneva called Une Femme coquette allowed him to return to France in the hopes of directing a feature which would “rival Citizen Kane in outsized ambition.” What ensued was a memorable series of films that changed the face of cinema—audacious, radical works like Breathless and Weekend (which ended with the famous title cards, “end of story” and “end of cinema”). Godard never enjoyed much commercial success, but he wowed the cognoscenti and such up-and-coming directors as George Lucas and Brian De Palma. New Yorker editor, film critic and independent moviemaker Brody draws on interviews with those closest to Godard to chronicle memorable events in his life and also offers in-depth discussion of the films. Taking a page from his subject, Brody mixes art and documentary to consider Godard’s existence, forever aware that what occurred in the director’s life was directly related to his films, which themselves drew on the high-pitched political climate of the 1960s and ’70s before becoming more formal and elegiac in later years.
Intoxicating and informative, a personal glimpse at one of the masters of cinema that will appeal to casual readers and filmgoers as well as Godard’s devoted fans.Pub Date: May 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8050-6886-3
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
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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