An entertaining, intertwined tale of triumph, hubris, and Manifest Destiny in the city of angels.
The birth of modern-day Los Angeles viewed through the prism of three of its most ardent advocates.
Krist carries forward the methodology he employed in his masterful portraits of Chicago (City of Scoundrels, 2012) and New Orleans (Empire of Sin, 2014), here applying his skills to LA, “the grand metropolis that never should have been.” The fact that the sprawling megalopolis even exists today is something of a small miracle, partly made possible by the early visionaries that championed the city’s dreams. As the author notes, rightly, “it was no sensible place to build a great city,” offering “few of the inducements to settlement and growth found near major cities in other places.” Darting between a macro and micro viewpoint, the author maintains his sharp focus on three primary subjects. The man with the plan was fabled engineer William Mulholland, whose infamous aqueduct and regional dams brought vital water to the city. The one with the dreams was D.W. Griffith, the frustrated actor who became a successful director and producer and transformed the movies from a novelty to a revolutionary medium. Finally, the true believer was Aimee Semple McPherson, a Pentecostal evangelist who used her celebrity to enrapture the troubled souls of LA. Through these three actors, Krist effectively demonstrates the massive opportunities the city represented in the early days of the 20th century as well as the personal tragedies that ultimately brought these dreamers low. Although the author unearths little that is historically groundbreaking, his dramatic portrayals of politics, scandals, sabotage, and bombings make for a rich, rewarding read. He also generates enormous sympathy for these flawed futurists, portraying not only the heights they reached in their respective careers, but also their radical falls from grace. Their fates ranged from an accidental demise to an unforgivable tragedy to that most acute of Hollywood endings: irrelevance.
An entertaining, intertwined tale of triumph, hubris, and Manifest Destiny in the city of angels.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-451-49638-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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