A solid behind-the-scenes movie book. While fans of the film will find the book irresistible, others may be less convinced...
Compellingly told story of the making and cultural effect of the 1976 Hollywood satire of the TV industry.
Best known for the signature rant (“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”) of its tragic antihero Howard Beale, Network appeared at a moment when paranoia went mainstream in American movies. (The film competed for audience and awards that year with such other dark crowd pleasers as Taxi Driver, All the President’s Men and Marathon Man.) New York Times culture reporter Itzkoff (Cocaine’s Son: A Memoir, 2011, etc.) naturally keeps his eye most closely on auteur Paddy Chayefsky, an irascible brick house of a man from the Bronx who won fame with his proletarian love story Marty (1955) and a reputation for stubborn insistence on fidelity to his scripts. The author shows how the idea developed over lunchtime conversations with Chayefsky’s close friends, including the choreographer Bob Fosse and playwright Herb Gardner, how he researched it by observing the NBC newsroom in action, and how he labored over the language in his starkly utilitarian office in midtown Manhattan. Itzkoff also zooms in on Chayefsky’s supporting players as they joined the project: the easygoing workhorse Sidney Lumet in the director’s chair; former Hollywood golden boy gone slightly to seed William Holden, hired to play the adulterous and conscience-stricken news director Max Schumacher; the notoriously “difficult” Faye Dunaway as ratings-crazy programming director Diana Christensen; and Peter Finch, who eagerly left retirement to lobby for the role of Beale.
A solid behind-the-scenes movie book. While fans of the film will find the book irresistible, others may be less convinced by Itzkoff’s case for Network’s prescience and cultural significance, supported though it may be by the opinions of Bill O’Reilly, Keith Olbermann, Anderson Cooper and others in the news industry.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9569-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
PROFILES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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