Film students will enjoy this book; however, to learn criticism, they should read Barry’s Let’s Go to the Pictures (1926).
Iris Barry (1895–1969) is one of the main reasons we can still see silent movies of Hollywood, Europe and Russia. Media and culture professor Sitton exhaustively traces Barry’s career from aspiring poet to playwright, biographer and film critic.
In 1916, Ezra Pound encouraged Barry to join his Bloomsbury coterie, where she met the love of her life, Wyndham Lewis. Their two children were generally ignored, and neither knew of the other’s existence; parenthood was certainly not Barry’s strong point. In 1923, Barry landed a job as film critic for the London Spectator, and her career blossomed from there. As she grew and learned, she managed to connect with all the right people—e.g., T.S. Eliot and Sidney Bernstein, with whom she founded the Film Society in London in 1925. This was the beginning of her quest to raise cinema from a lower-class beer-hall diversion to a legitimate art form, and she convinced European film societies to contribute copies of their films for preservation. Though her work raised film to a high art, however, she never defined the criteria for a good film. Her introduction to art historian Alfred Barr proved to be the key to her involvement in the film library at the Museum of Modern Art. While her husband, John Abbott, got most of the credit, it was Iris who collected and cataloged the international library of films that would have been destroyed in World War II. Life at MOMA, the involvement in wartime propaganda, the gossipy tale of Barr’s replacement by Abbott and the easing out of Iris from her life’s work all help reduce the ennui of Sitton’s name-dropping, long quotes and abundance of information in general.
Film students will enjoy this book; however, to learn criticism, they should read Barry’s Let’s Go to the Pictures (1926).Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-231-16578-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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