This new biography of one of America's greatest filmmakers places great emphasis on the nasty side of his personality. As Davis (History/Southern Methodist Univ; The Glamour Factory, 1993, etc.) shows, Ford was a difficult man to know and to work with, a cantankerous, irascible genius with a penchant for hard drinking and verbal abuse of actors and technicians. That doesn't, however, dim the brilliance of his films, as Davis points out: Ford won six Oscars, and his filmography boasts some of the greatest achievements in American cinema, including Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, How Green Was My Valley, My Darling Clementine, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. A first-generation Irish- American, Ford fancied himself as a tough, working-class son of the Ould Sod and wasn't above mythologizing his roots. Davis traces his life and career in equal parts, from his Maine childhood (on which this book is refreshingly enlightening) to his silent-movie days in the budding film industry and on through his many triumphs. Davis appears to have interviewed virtually every surviving member of Ford's informal stock company, eliciting often disturbing stories of his off-set alcoholism and on-set temper. The story of the director's physical and emotional decline toward the end of his career makes for particularly painful reading. However, while Davis has added some brush strokes to the existing picture of Ford, his book is repetitive and frequently dull. Davis has little of interest to say about the films themselves, adding nothing to the already voluminous critical literature, and his occasional excursions into psychobiography are off-target (as in the fatuous, casual suggestion that Ford might have been a repressed homosexual). Although not without its useful contributions to the Ford story, this book does not fill the need for a definitive biography of this major American artist.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8061-2708-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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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