Solid reporting on a significant body of work. (40 photos)
An objective take on the life and works of a groundbreaking, controversial filmmaker. Despite the misleading author credit, this is not an autobiography.
Rather, the work is a biography by Pakistani-British filmmaker and critic Aftab, writing here with the permission of his subject, who comments at length on virtually every issue the book covers. Aftab occasionally verges on fan-magazine style (“[Lee’s] wedding signaled a new Spike Lee”), but mostly he offers an even-handed portrait in which Lee comes across as talented and innovative, yet also arrogant and hyper-sensitive to criticism. Aftab’s most significant thread is that Lee’s creation of a production company, Forty Acres and a Mule Filmworks, opened up opportunities for black filmmakers and, in its films, presented realistic, trenchant accounts of black characters and the issues they face. Aftab’s accounts of Lee at work, directing Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, She’s Gotta Have It, etc., offer a wealth of details about the man’s methods. Quotes from actors, photographers, writers and producers flesh out the accounts, forming a valuable record of Lee’s achievements. Most importantly, Aftab doesn’t shy from exploring the prickly issues Lee and his films raise: Is Lee himself racist when he insists, as he did when making Malcolm X, that “white directors can’t get it right” when they depict the lives of black characters? Are the depictions of gays and lesbians in Lee’s films homophobic and the images of women sexist? Are Lee’s films inspired, but technically crude, as some critics suggest? Aftab quotes primary sources who come down on all sides of these issues. The clashing views leave the reader somewhat adrift—Aftab shies from drawing more general conclusions about Lee and his films.
Solid reporting on a significant body of work. (40 photos)Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-06153-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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