A sad Faustian story that features the artistic triumphs of a woman who figuratively climbed a roof at Auschwitz to get a...
A former movie producer and, subsequently, chronicler of Hollywood legends (Marlene Dietrich, 1992) and legendary fiascos (Final Cut, 1985) revisits what a documentary filmmaker once called “the wonderful, horrible life” of cinema’s most controversial figure.
This second recent biography of Riefenstahl focuses a bit more on her cinematic style than its predecessor, Jürgen Trimborn’s Leni Riefenstahl (Jan. 2007). Trimborn had the advantages (and frustrations) of interviews with Riefenstahl (who died in 2003 at 101), but Bach has an insider’s view of how films are produced. Still, the two books cover much the same ground and issue many of the same judgments. Bach begins with a snapshot of the Berlin film world of 1925, then returns to the birth and childhood of Helene Amalia Bertha Riefenstahl, born 1902. (Cross-eyed as an infant, Leni would in a metaphorical sense never lose that disability.) Young Leni desperately wanted a career in the arts. She tried dance, sustained an injury, segued smoothly into the nascent film industry, where she acted in some popular alpine films, then moved behind the camera. Her great assets were her stunning beauty, her ferocious work ethic and her ability to curry favor. In 1930s Germany, she found the most powerful patron of all, Adolf Hitler. Bach carefully reconstructs their relationship (he does not believe the two were ever sexually involved) and shows her varied relations with other Nazi notables (Goebbels, Speer, Bormann). Bach looks with a filmmaker’s eye at Riefenstahl’s great popular successes (Triumph of the Will, Olympia), as well as her lesser known and aborted films (Tiefland, Black Cargo). He skips quickly over her later years—her books of African photographs, her underwater film (he calls Underwater Impressions “soporific”). On his subject’s considerable moral failings, Bach is unrelenting. She knew she was in the presence of evil; she found it attractive—and lucrative.
A sad Faustian story that features the artistic triumphs of a woman who figuratively climbed a roof at Auschwitz to get a closer look at the clouds.Pub Date: March 19, 2007
ISBN: 0-375-40400-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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