A neat encapsulation of an amazing career.
The unlikely rise to fame of one of India’s biggest movie stars, contextualized by the evolution of the Bollywood film industry.
After digesting Chopra’s (Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, 2003, etc.) book, few readers will be in doubt that Shah Rukh Khan chose the correct line of work. Khan’s life story is full of all the drama, tragedy and seemingly insurmountable hurdles that populate his movies, and Chopra infuses the pivotal moments of his life with an edge-of-your-seat tension worthy of the best Bollywood blockbusters. Khan began as a disciple of perhaps the most famous of all Bollywood stars, the ruggedly good-looking Amitabh Bachchan. But compared to Bachchan, Khan was a reckless, disheveled rogue whose career choices and lifestyle marked him as a rank outsider. As Chopra chronicles Khan’s improbable rise—first in television, then in film and finally as a jack-of-all-trades entrepreneur—she occasionally dips into wider developments in Indian culture. The Americanization of India is given ample coverage, and Chopra writes at length on how marketing, and branding (one chapter is titled “Brand SRK”), took a stranglehold on both Bollywood and society as a whole. She also looks at how the mob put increasing pressure on Indian businesses through extortion rackets and murder in the late 1990s, eventually infecting Bollywood through the presence of notorious mobster Abu Salem, who practically forced Khan into hiding. This signified the beginning of a bleak period for the actor, as it coincided with various failings in his businesses and in his on-screen career—and the events provide a real cinematic twist, allowing Chopra to muse on her fallen hero’s dark days, which are, of course, tempered by an inevitably triumphant comeback with the movie Devdas. Chopra offers a solid entry-level introduction to both Bollywood and one of its biggest stars. The only flaw is the lack of detailed interview material with its primary subject, but this is nicely counterbalanced by the author’s musings on wider developments in Bollywood.
A neat encapsulation of an amazing career.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-446-57858-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
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