A raw, messy volume of interview transcripts, saved in part by the unquenchable entertainment value of behind-the-scenes stories of how directors bring their movies to life. This edition is a spinoff of a monthly series of interviews conducted by Emery for the Encore cable network, although these are not transcripts of the shows. Emery is a CEO of Media Entertainment and a director himself, but there’s not much of him in this work except brief introductions of his subjects. He doesn—t even question the directors, who include James Cameron, Lawrence Kasdan, Richard Donner, and John Carpenter. All of the talking is left to the directors themselves, in whatever clipped or rambling or rambunctious manner they choose to employ. The result is a mishmash of material that never makes much sense as a collection. There’s lots of repetition, run-on sentences, and lost inflections. At some points, it’s hard to follow the speakers— narratives because the questions aren—t provided. At others, it feels as if one is reading a reporter’s notes instead of a book. The good material comes at the beginning of each section, as the directors talk about how they got started in the business. These were young men—all men in Take One—all of them movie lovers who found their way to Hollywood because of their passion (although Ron Howard was thrust before the camera before he could walk). The directors are led through their films one by one, doling out tidbits about casting and telling how they feel about their work. Unfortunately, most of their stories are cut short before they gather momentum, and nobody makes any startling revelations. Nevertheless, any volume that assembles the thoughts of Sidney Lumet, Spike Lee, Sydney Pollack, Norman Jewison, and Robert Wise is going to have some plums—for readers willing to dig deep enough. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57500-087-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
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
PERSPECTIVES
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