A collection of essays by one of the world's great filmmakers, dating back to his early days as a film buff. The late Satyajit Ray, who received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1991, was easily the finest director ever produced by the endlessly prolific Indian film industry. Unlike the majority of his colleagues, he worked in Bengali rather than Hindi (the dominant language of his country), and he made quietly intelligent, liberal humanist films rather than raucous four-hour musicals, the popular staple. This collection of his occasional writings on Indian and foreign films, published in India in 1976, reflects his humanist concerns. In the course of such essays as ``What Is Wrong with Indian Films?'' and ``The Odds Against Us,'' he repeatedly argues for a cinema about personal problems and large issues, a cinema that is perhaps a little too content-based for the tastes of many critics. The pieces, which date from 1948 to 1974, include several lovely reminiscences and journal excerpts from his filmmaking days; in fact, the best material describes working and traveling at home and abroad. Unfortunately, the book and film reviews that make up the bulk of the volume are disappointingly ordinary; he has little new to say about Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, or the other directors he admires. On occasion, Ray will rise up in a manifesto-like tone, urging Indian filmmakers to draw on their own social reality rather than following foreign models, however admirable. At those moments, his prose catches fire again. Rather than issuing this collection of often indifferent material, Hyperion would have done a greater service to Ray's memory by publishing more of his working journals or reminiscences.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1994
ISBN: 0-7868-6122-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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