Frenetically entertaining.
Film, video and commercial producer Oreck recalls her adventures as a pioneer in the music-video field.
A self-described “socialistically inclined ex–hippie chick,” the author grew up in California, got pregnant at 16 and held random jobs while taking film classes and yearning to become a movie producer. Rejected by top studios, she worked for years on low-budget genre movies. With the rise of MTV in 1981, she began her successful career as a Grammy Award–winning producer of rock videos for such performers as Mick Jagger, Metallica, Michael Jackson and Sting. Recounting one project after another, Oreck provides amusing, often biting glimpses of an array of hotties, druggies, incompetents and others who join with high-maintenance stars and pompous record-company executives to produce video promos for the latest song hits. Crises abound: Neighbors called the police when 20 crosses were set afire during a Madonna shoot; homeless cross-dressers pursued Janet Jackson on the streets of Los Angeles; and dozens of pigeons splattered on the ground after their release during the making of a Sheila E video. The author discusses her struggles to get along with a difficult business partner, her decision to not learn her personal assistant’s name until 90 days had passed without a drug- or felony-related incident, and her discovery that two longtime production assistants were dealing pot to celebrities. Oreck renders scenes and conversations vividly, displaying a remarkable gift for memory or invention, or perhaps both. In addition to describing her work at her boutique firm, O Pictures, she writes about her youthful stay at the Florence Crittenton Home for Unwed Mothers, where Miss Olive, the 400-pound assistant chef, insisted the girls eat like women, and fellow residents derided the author’s love for Joni Mitchell songs (“That is stupid white pussy shit”). Oreck’s memoir will leave many readers as exhausted as the author was when she closed her business several years ago, resolving never to produce another rock video or commercial.
Frenetically entertaining.Pub Date: May 18, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-86547-986-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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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