A rich, exuberant life, well-captured in this exuberant biography.
A star-studded homage to a prolific director.
In this loving, abundantly detailed biography, Wellman Jr. (The Man and His Wings: William A. Wellman and the Making of the First Best Picture, 2006) pays tribute to his father, William Wellman (1896-1995), director of such notable movies as The Public Enemy (1931), starring James Cagney; Yellow Sky (1948), with Gregory Peck; and The High and the Mighty (1954), with John Wayne. Although he worked in more than 100 movies and directed 76, he received only three Academy Award nominations for direction and won only for his screenwriting of the original 1937 version of A Star Is Born. Believing that both the man and his work “are decidedly underappreciated,” Wellman traces his father’s productive 40-year career, setting the stage with his restless, raucous youth. “He found society alien and authority figures oppressive,” writes the author. Impulsive and impatient, expelled from high school, he was headed for delinquency. World War I saved him: Rejected by the American Army, he set out for France. “For me, it’s either war or jail,” he told his family. In the French Foreign Legion, he was called “Wild Bill,” an epithet that his son finds apt. He earned the Croix de Guerre, returned to join the U.S. Air Service and became a flight instructor in San Diego. A short-lived marriage to an actress connected him to Hollywood, where he briefly acted and soon became an assistant director. His first solo stint was a Western, The Man Who Won (1923), and his acclaimed Wings (1927) drew on his war experiences. Wellman went on to work for every major studio, seeking with each new contract more freedom to bring in his own projects—freedom, and money, granted to him as his stature grew. He worked with megastars and studio moguls, all portrayed here in lively detail. A filmography reprises the producer and cast of every Wellman movie.
A rich, exuberant life, well-captured in this exuberant biography.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-307-37770-8
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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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