Essential for anyone interested in racial issues and the history of American filmmaking; a well researched, passionately...
The frankly amazing story of the black D.W. Griffith.
Biographer McGilligan (Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness, 2003, etc.) gives a fascinating account of the eventful life of Oscar Micheaux, the first significant African-American filmmaker, a Promethean figure whose current relative obscurity is nothing short of baffling. Micheaux, the child of former slaves, exhibited unusual ambition and determination from a young age, leaving his home of Great Bend, Kan., while still a teenager to work as a Pullman porter. A handsome, intelligent, well-read young man (he inherited a reverence for education and the tenets of Booker T. Washington from his mother), Micheaux moved easily across the racial divide, striking up friendships with white passengers and engaging them in long conversations about the world beyond his own experience. Micheaux appreciated the relatively good money, travel and prestige afforded by his job with Pullman, but was sickened by the required servility and the graft that was endemic in the profession. He made the astonishing decision to go west and join the ranks of thousands of hopeful homesteaders—overwhelmingly white—and establish a farming concern in South Dakota. He succeeded in this venture, and in winning over his curious white neighbors. These experiences provided grist for his many novels and groundbreaking films, unprecedented in their translation of the American black experience to the screen. How did a self-made black farmer come to publish novels and direct movies in 1919? For the ever-industrious Micheaux, the answer was simple: Create your own publishing and film-production companies. The filmmaker comes vividly to life in McGilligan’s narrative, as the author quotes copiously from Micheaux’s letters and autobiographical works, revealing the optimism, erudition, insight and flashes of self-deprecating wit behind his mind-boggling accomplishments and dizzyingly complicated personal life.
Essential for anyone interested in racial issues and the history of American filmmaking; a well researched, passionately felt and endlessly fascinating look at a singular American life.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-073139-7
Page Count: 392
Publisher: HC/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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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