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cut a swath through the jet-set film world, producing his eclectic mix of art and spectacle films, squiring his withdrawn actress wife Silvana Magano to festivals, building the massive Dinocittà film studio outside Rome and always dealing, dealing, dealing.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 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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