A comprehensive look at one of American acting’s neglected Grand Masters.
A serious, if quasi-hagiographic, biography—the first—of the famously powerful and charismatic actor.
British film critic Hutchinson (Horror and Fantasy in the Cinema, not reviewed) is a friend of Steiger’s, and his narrative reflects this—for while he addresses Steiger’s wilderness years and encounters with depression, this is not an unvarnished portrait. What emerges is a sympathetic close look at the actor’s larger-than-life personality and seemingly star-crossed career. Steiger never knew his father and grew up chafing under his increasingly alcoholic mother, then found escape serving on a destroyer in WWII. Drifting into the Civil Service, he joined a drama group to meet girls, then studied acting with Erwin Piscator at the New School; he later was drafted into the Actor’s Studio, where he was schooled in the “Method” of naturalistic, inner-directed acting (regarding which Hutchinson takes a leisurely detour). His professional career took off gradually: roles in television theater (like Paddy Chayefsky’s groundbreaking Marty) led to triumphant films like On the Waterfront—and crucial missteps like Oklahoma (which he felt typecast him as a villain). His personal affinity for Steiger aside, Hutchinson provides telling portraits of a mid-century New York (where television and theater were innovative and infused with talent) and of the reckless creative spirit behind early TV and such films as The Pawnbroker. The author also examines the long period when health and circumstance led Steiger to act in many films that were below the standards of his peak performances, and includes a brief but intense selection of Steiger’s poems and a lengthy interview with Steiger (taken from a 1992 event at the National Film Theatre in London).
A comprehensive look at one of American acting’s neglected Grand Masters.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-88064-253-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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