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
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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