An enthusiastic close-up of movie history.
A celebration of a beloved movie.
Fans of The Sound of Music will find plenty to please them in Santopietro’s (The Godfather Effect: Changing Hollywood, America, and Me, 2012, etc.) history of the sweeping musical. In the 1950s, two German movies about the von Trapp family came to the attention of director Vincent Donehue, who imagined a Broadway version with Mary Martin in the role of Maria. After complicated negotiations with the German film company and Maria herself, Donehue signed Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse to write the play and the renowned Rodgers and Hammerstein to produce an original score. The show opened on Nov. 16, 1959, won five Tony awards and ran for three years. Soon, 20th Century Fox optioned the story; William Wyler agreed to direct, replaced by Robert Wise when Wyler decided to move to another project; and Ernest Lehman was brought in to rewrite the script. Casting Julie Andrews for the starring role was not inevitable. Although a hit on Broadway, Andrews “was a completely unknown quantity on film,” scaring investors who wanted “a real movie star with box office clout.” With support from Wise and the composers, Andrews was offered the role and grabbed it. Among contenders to play Capt. von Trapp were Rex Harrison, David Niven, Peter Finch and even Bing Crosby. Wise, though, opted shrewdly for Christopher Plummer. During filming, Andrews was exemplary, exuding “nonstop good cheer” and endless patience with the “seven potentially scene-stealing children” in the cast. The author details the painstaking complexities of producing a big-budget extravaganza, reprising every song and dance step, and the considerable task of generating buzz about the movie before it opened. All those efforts paid off: Warmly received by critics (except for Pauline Kael), it earned 10 Oscar nominations and was the highest-grossing film of 1965.
An enthusiastic close-up of movie history.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1250064462
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A crash course in big-bucks tort litigation, as rich as any novel on the scene. In the mid-'70s, the small industrial town of Woburn, Mass., found itself afflicted with a plague of biblical dimensions: 12 local children, 8 of them close neighbors, had died (or were dying) of leukemia. The parents suspected the water supply, which was foul-smelling, rusty, and undrinkable, but they had no hard evidence of a link to the cancers. But in 1979, the accidental discovery of carcinogenic industrial wastes in the town's wells led the grieving parents to hire personal-injury lawyer Jan Schlichtmann, new to the profession but intoxicated with the sizable damages he'd won so far. This is magazine journalist Harr's first book, but his complex portrait of Schlichtmann is the work of a master. Egomaniacal, quixotic, workaholic, greedy, altruistic, and naive, Schlichtmann is Everylawyer, and as he allows the Woburn case to consume his practice, he almost loses his license and his life. Harr wisely downplays the dying-children angle, focusing instead on Schlichtmann's case against the two corporate Goliaths who dumped the waste: Beatrice Foods (represented by Jerome Facher of Boston's Hale & Dorr) and W.R. Grace (represented by William Cheeseman of Boston's Foley, Hoag & Eliot). Despite their white- shoe lineage, Facher and Cheeseman play dirty, withholding evidence and repeatedly seeking Schlichtmann's suspension for having filed a ``frivolous'' lawsuit. But the real villain of the story is Federal District Judge Walter J. Skinner, whose personal dislike of Schlichtmann (and camaraderie with Facher) leads him to grant the defense's motion to split the trial into two protracted phases. By the time Judge Skinner submits four incomprehensible questions to be bewildered jury, Woburn's young victims have been forgottenand the whole legal system has suffered a tragic loss. A paranoid legal thriller as readable as Grisham, but important and illuminating. (Film rights to Disney)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-394-56349-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
A generous and singularly insightful examination of memoir.
A bestselling nonfiction writer offers spirited commentary about memoir, the literary form that has become synonymous with her name.
Personal narrative has exploded in popularity over the last 20 years. Yet, as Karr (Lit: A Memoir, 2009, etc.) points out, memoir still struggles to attain literary respectability. “There is a lingering snobbery in the literary world,” she writes, “that wants to disqualify what is broadly called nonfiction from the category of ‘literature.’ ” In this book, Karr offers both an apology for and a sharp-eyed exploration of this form born from her years as a practitioner as well as a distinguished English professor at Syracuse University. She begins by considering classroom “experiments” she has conducted to show the slipperiness of memory and arguing the need to give latitude to writers tackling memoir. Writing with the intent to record what rings true rather than exact is one thing; writing with the intent to lie is another. Voice is another critical aspect of any memoir that manages to endure through time. By examining works by writers as diverse as Frank McCourt and Vladimir Nabokov, Karr demonstrates that it is in fact the very thing by which a great memoir “lives or dies.” Rather than focus on the narrative truism of “show-don’t-tell,” Karr thoughtfully elaborates on what she calls “carnality”—the ability to transform memory into a multisensory experience—for the reader. When wed to a desire to move beyond the traps of ego and render personal “psychic struggle” honestly and without fear, carnality can lead to writing that not only “wring[s] some truth from the godawful mess of a single life,” but also connects deeply with readers. Karr’s sassy Texas wit and her down-to-earth observations about both the memoir form and how to approach it combine to make for lively and inspiring reading.
A generous and singularly insightful examination of memoir.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-222306-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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