This biography limns a man driven by ideas but thwarted by oppression from all fronts—family, business, and government. Using material recently made public by the Russian government, South African-born film scholar Bergan (Jean Renoir: Projections of Paradise, 1994) effectively dispels perceptions of the Soviet director as a “calculating, didactic theorist whose films ‘lack humanity.’ “ Bergan provides a reflective yet chatty portrait of Eisenstein as a gifted iconoclast who escaped his domineering, bourgeois father to embrace the new Soviet state and the “Eighth Art” of film only to confront greater tacticians in Hollywood types and censure by Josef Stalin. Paramount terminated Eisenstein’s contract early, and David O. Selznick rejected his screenplay adaptation of An American Tragedy as potentially a “most miserable two hours to millions of happy-minded young Americans.” Stalinist censors rejected his now-lost film Bezhin Meadow (which Bergan believes may have been his greatest achievement) and forced Eisenstein to —confess— its political groundlessness and anti-artistic tendencies. Bergan’s erudite, jargon- free film analyses complement the personal history and reveal Eisenstein as a humanist and early maker of movie illusion. Long before George Lucas added sound to outer space in Star Wars, Eisenstein fabricated the bloodbath on the Odessa Steps in The Battleship Potemkin. True to the power of the film image, it stands as an icon of the 1905 revolution. As for the image of Eisenstein, this biography views him not as an underappreciated film pioneer who must be revisited but as a cinema genius of lost potential. Like Orson Welles, Eisenstein won an early place in the cinema pantheon and followed it with decades of fits and starts, notably the aforementioned Bezhin Meadow and the truncated, John Dos Passos-financed QuÇ Viva MÇxico! An accessible, smart chronicle of a creative genius attempting to follow art and country. (36 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 27, 1999
ISBN: 0-87951-924-X
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
Literature knows few champions as ardent and insightful—or as uncompromising—as Gornick, which is to readers’ good fortune.
Gornick’s (The Odd Woman and the City, 2016) ferocious but principled intelligence emanates from each of the essays in this distinctive collection.
Rereading texts, and comparing her most recent perceptions against those of the past, is the linchpin of the book, with the author revisiting such celebrated novels as D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Colette's The Vagabond, Marguerite Duras' The Lover, and Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris. Gornick also explores the history and changing face of Jewish American fiction as expressions of "the other." The author reads more deeply and keenly than most, with perceptions amplified by the perspective of her 84 years. Though she was an avatar of "personal journalism" and a former staff writer for the Village Voice—a publication that “had a muckraking bent which made its writers…sound as if they were routinely holding a gun to society’s head”—here, Gornick mostly subordinates her politics to the power of literature, to the books that have always been her intimates, old friends to whom she could turn time and again. "I read ever and only to feel the power of Life with a capital L," she writes; it shows. The author believes that for those willing to relinquish treasured but outmoded interpretations, rereading over a span of decades can be a journey, sometimes unsettling, toward richer meanings of books that are touchstones of one's life. As always, Gornick reveals as much about herself as about the writers whose works she explores; particularly arresting are her essays on Lawrence and on Natalia Ginzburg. Some may feel she has a tendency to overdramatize, but none will question her intellectual honesty. It is reflected throughout, perhaps nowhere so vividly as in a vignette involving a stay in Israel, where, try as she might, Gornick could not get past the "appalling tribalism of the culture.”
Literature knows few champions as ardent and insightful—or as uncompromising—as Gornick, which is to readers’ good fortune.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-28215-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered...
The inspirational and ultimately redemptive story of a teenage girl’s descent into hell, framed as a parable of faith.
The disappearance of 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart in 2002 made national headlines, turning an entire country into a search party; it seemed like something of a miracle when she reappeared, rescued almost by happenstance, nine months later. As the author suggests, it was something of a mystery that her ordeal lasted that long, since there were many times when she was close to being discovered. Her captors, a self-proclaimed religious prophet whose sacraments included alcohol, pornography and promiscuous sex, and his wife and accomplice, jealous of this “second wife” he had taken, weren’t exactly criminal masterminds. In fact, his master plan was for similar kidnappings to give him seven wives in all, though Elizabeth’s abduction was the only successful one. She didn’t write her account for another nine years, at which point she had a more mature perspective on the ordeal, and with what one suspects was considerable assistance from co-author Stewart, who helps frame her story and fill in some gaps. Though the account thankfully spares readers the graphic details, Smart tells of the abuse and degradation she suffered, of the fear for her family’s safety that kept her from escaping and of the faith that fueled her determination to survive. “Anyone who suggests that I became a victim of Stockholm syndrome by developing any feelings of sympathy for my captors simply has no idea what was going on inside my head,” she writes. “I never once—not for a single moment—developed a shred of affection or empathy for either of them….The only thing there ever was was fear.”
Smart hopes that sharing her story might help heal the scars of others, though the book is focused on what she suffered rather than how she recovered.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-04015-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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