Fellini’s personality remains slightly elusive, but Kezich delineates his artistic achievements with authority and...
A solid biography of the famed Italian director, particularly strong on the evolution of his movies’ style and subject matter.
Corriere della Sera film critic Kezich (Dino, 2004) first met Fellini (1920–93) after a screening of The White Sheik at the 1952 Venice Film Festival, forming a lifelong friendship that enables the author to knowledgeably discuss the director’s working methods and discreetly allude to his complicated personal life. (The arrivals and departures of various girlfriends are noted, though in Kezich’s judgment he remained fundamentally loyal to wife Giulietta Masina.) Fellini’s youth in the provincial town of Rimini, seedbed for I Vitelloni and Amarcord, is covered briefly; like most ambitious young Italians, he departed as soon as possible for Rome, where he was a popular newspaper columnist and radio writer before discovering his life’s work as screenwriter for Roberto Rossellini’s Open City and Paisan. Growing up in fascist Italy, young Fellini displayed a cheerful political apathy that disconcerted dogmatic critics when he achieved his first real fame in the 1950s with La Strada and Nights of Cabiria, both starring Masina. “Why was the political left so slow to recognize whose side the director was on?” asks Kezich, who correctly discerns sympathy for the underdog and hatred of repressive authority in all of Fellini’s work. Tracing the director’s progress from the scandalous La Dolce Vita and the revelatory, autobiographical 8½ through such later films as Satyricon, Orchestra Rehearsal and And the Ship Sails On, the author sees Fellini moving beyond the nostalgic, folkloric atmosphere of his early films to a more adult confrontation with modern life, explored in a bold, idiosyncratic, often surreal style. Longtime collaborators like composer Nino Rota and cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno get their due, and Kezich astutely anatomizes Fellini’s tumultuous interactions with practically every Italian producer of note, including Dino De Laurentiis, and his affectionate yet charged relationship with cinematic alter-ago Marcello Mastroianni.
Fellini’s personality remains slightly elusive, but Kezich delineates his artistic achievements with authority and perceptiveness.Pub Date: March 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-571-21168-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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
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
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