Find space on the crowded Chaplin shelf for this perceptive, literate take on the great screen clown.
A fresh entry in the evergreen field of works devoted to Charlie Chaplin.
If ever an artist’s life lent itself to psychoanalysis, it’s Chaplin’s. His alcoholic father abandoned him and his brother when they were children, leaving him in the abject poverty of a London slum with an encephalitic mother who ended up in a madhouse. “We laugh…in order not to weep,” said Chaplin years later. Rather than take the fun out of Chaplin’s comedies with tendentious theorizing, Weissman, a faculty member at the Washington School of Psychiatry, lends dimension to the classics, drawing reasonable connections between Chaplin’s life and art. The author demonstrates Chaplin’s ability to transform family heartbreak into film comedies such as The Gold Rush, Modern Times and City Lights. Equally influential on Chaplin’s art were the early days he spent honing his craft in British music halls. With lean, energetic prose, Weissman ably sidesteps stilted academic writing to bring this colorful theatrical period to life. He offers vivid sketches of the hardships of touring in the hardscrabble provinces and the painstaking, meticulous ways in which Chaplin honed his talents. Childhood pain, the music-hall apprenticeships and the new art of film aligned in Hollywood as Chaplin went to work for director Mack Sennett. Weissman carefully follows the confluence of several artists that led to the creation of Chaplin’s iconic Little Tramp. Throughout the book, the author caps exhaustive sourcing with an overlay of insightful observations about Chaplin’s creative process.
Find space on the crowded Chaplin shelf for this perceptive, literate take on the great screen clown.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55970-892-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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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