American cinema's least Hollywood-like director never quite emerges from the shadows in this biography, but many useful career details do. LoBrutto (a film editor who teaches at the School of Visual Arts) freely admits to being ``totally obsessed'' with his reclusive subject, and his obsession shows as he traces Kubrick from Bronx child to Look photographer to London-based filmmaker famed for the vision and perfectionism of movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and Full Metal Jacket. Along the way, every available fact is thrown in: not only Kubrick's school report cards (he was deemed ``unsatisfactory in social areas''), but a handwriting analysis that unsurprisingly reveals him as a ``perfectionist.'' Fans of the ``master'' (as he is sometimes adoringly called here) will enjoy the wealth of detail, some based on new interviews, some on exhaustive canvassing of previous research. But the Holy Grail—an original interview with the director—is not here, nor are answers to such personal questions as what went wrong with his first and second marriages. Most of the people interviewed know Kubrick only superficially, and are unable to offer intimate insight. In place of that, LoBrutto provides ample behind-the-scenes coverage of each Kubrick film from conception to exhibition, exploring such matters as his early low- budget ``guerrilla filmmaking,'' troubles with Kirk Douglas on Spartacus, and the use of the Steadicam in The Shining. The prose is occasionally purple or obscure (what does it mean to say ``Wartime Lies is a penultimate Stanley Kubrick project''?), and some passages are repetitive, particularly when discussing Kubrick's penchant for many takes of the same shot. But on the whole, the book is readable and informative, both for devoted fans and casual admirers. A brave, and often successful, attempt to chronicle the life of a filmmaker famous for his noncooperation with chroniclers.
Pub Date: Dec. 30, 1996
ISBN: 1-55611-492-3
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Donald Fine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996
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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