A spirited, passionate account of a man who deserves his own film, starring Anthony Quinn.
The life of a great movie producer inevitably ends up being more about the movies than the man.
Born in a small Neapolitian village in 1919, son of a pasta maker, Agostino DeLaurentiis was later, and correctly, described as a sort of Italian Horatio Alger. Agostino (who would later christen himself “Dino” in an early display of showbiz smarts) went to Rome to study acting when still a teenager. There, he quickly threw himself into the world of film, producing his first one by the age of 22. A short, unwilling stint in the army—marked more by black comedy than heroism or tragedy—barely interrupted DeLaurentiis’s rise to prominence, which coincided with the postwar flowering of Italian cinema. His partnership with Fellini resulted in the classics La Strada and Nights of Cabiria while, at the same time, he was producing grand, popular epics like the Audrey Hepburn version of War and Peace. Working at a pace that seems close to compulsive, DeLaurentiis cut a swath through the jet-set film world, producing his eclectic mix of art and spectacle films, squiring his withdrawn actress wife Silvana Magano to festivals, building the massive Dinocittà film studio outside Rome and always dealing, dealing, dealing. He moved to New York in the 1970s and struck gold with hits like Serpico and Three Days of the Condor. Now in his early 80s, DeLaurentiis is producing the $150 million Baz Luhrmann saga Alexander the Great. Kezich and Levantesi, both Italian film critics, seem a bit cowed by their subject—there’s an occasional attempt to bring this larger-than-life, tall-tale–teller to the truth, but mostly they let their account explode with the man’s zest for life and movies. By the end, it’s hard not to be duly impressed as well by DeLaurentiis, who showed as much love for his ill-fated King Kong remake as he did for the little Bergman film The Serpent’s Egg. And who else would have fought to have David Lynch direct Dune?
A spirited, passionate account of a man who deserves his own film, starring Anthony Quinn.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7868-6902-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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