An inspiring tale of a remarkable life.
Detailed, colorful autobiography by one of America’s most creative filmmakers.
The gritty, uncompromising work of director Fuller (1911–97) has over the years won him a devoted international cult following. Martin Scorsese (who contributes an introduction) and Steven Spielberg (who keeps a cherished copy of Fuller’s 1954 submarine action film, Hell and High Water, in the trunk of his car) are among those who have long respected his brand of frank, violent realism. And Fuller’s life story, told here in scrappy prose, is almost more incredible than some of his scripts. Raised in New York City, he worked as a copy boy and crime reporter in the yeasty era of 1920s tabloid journalism, rode the rails during the Depression writing freelance pieces about Hoovervilles, published three novels, then enlisted in the US Army immediately after Pearl Harbor. Unabashed about revealing his heroes (Abe Lincoln, Ben Franklin, and Marlene Dietrich, among others), Fuller has a Forrest Gump–like knack for being in places where history is being made, and his account is filled with vignettes of his encounters with the famous and infamous, including Al Capone, William Randolph Hearst, and Alfred Hitchcock. As a member of the legendary infantry unit memorialized in his 1980 film, The Big Red One, he saw action from North Africa through the invasion of Sicily, landed on Omaha Beach on D-day, and was caught in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, Fuller rose to Hollywood acclaim with movies distinguished by his mastery of the themes of conflict and heroism. Films like I Shot Jesse James (1949), Pickup on South Street (1953), Underworld, U.S.A. (1961), and Shock Corridor (1963) were standouts for their punchy dialogue, innovative plotlines, and powerful direction. He lived some of his last years in France, where his work has been popular ever since it inspired Jean-Luc Goddard and other filmmakers of the French New Wave in the 1950s.
An inspiring tale of a remarkable life.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40165-2
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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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