Entries tagged 'memoir'

A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung is a follow-up to her first memoir, All You Can Never Know, which I posted briefly about before. Where that was book was about her early life and connecting with her birth family, this one circles back to cover more with her adopted parents and their passing.

It is a beautiful book, and I found tremendously sad but ultimately hopeful. While I don’t have anything comparable in my life to being adopted and those aspects of family dynamics, I certainly connected with her story of losing her mom at long-distance in the first year of the pandemic.

Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions by Ed Zwick is a Hollywood memoir from one of the creators of thirtysomething and director of films including Glory, The Last Samurai, and Blood Diamond. It’s full of good stories well told, as you might expect, and also liberally sprinkled with writing and directing advice in the form of humorous lists, like “Ten Tips from Long Lunches with Sydney (Lumet).”

More than anything, it left me wanting to watch and re-watch some his films and those of the people he talks about a lot in the book like Denzel Washington. We did watch Glory before I started this and reading Zwick’s behind-the-scenes take on it really helped crystallize for me what I had liked about the film and how those performances came to be. We have The Last Samurai queued up to watch soon.

I also enjoyed how Russell Crowe kept popping up in strange and unexpected ways, which is funnier now that I look at their respective filmographies and see that they haven’t ever actually worked together. That doesn’t seem entirely accidental on Zwick’s part.

I double-checked whether they had worked together using The Oracle of Bacon and I love that it is still around. The list of the “centers of the Hollywood universe” (defined here) is incredible.

it has been a few months since i finished all you can ever know by nicole chung, and pretty much all i can say about it at this point is that i enjoyed it, immediately put her next book in my library queue, and have probably had to postpone that delivery a half-dozen times since then because i haven’t had any time for reading lately.