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
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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