Book description
Steven Spielberg is responsible for some of the most successful
films of all time: Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E. T. and
the 'Indiana Jones' series. Yet for many years most critics
condescendingly regarded Spielberg as a child-man incapable of dealing
maturely with the complexities of life. The deeper levels of meaning
in his films were largely ignored. This changed with Schindler's List,
his masterpiece about a gentile businessman who saves eleven hundred
Jews from the Holocaust. For Spielberg, the film was the culmination
of a long struggle with his Jewish identity - an identity of which he
had long been ashamed, but now triumphantly embraced. Until the first
edition of Steven Spielberg: A Biography was published in 1997, much
about Spielberg's personality and the forces that shaped it had
remained enigmatic, in large part because of his tendency to obscure
and mythologize his own past. In his astute and perceptive biography,
Joseph McBride reconciled Spielberg's seeming contradictions and
produced a coherent portrait of the man who found a way to transmute
the anxieties of his own childhood into some of the most emotionally
powerful and viscerally exciting films ever made. In the second
edition, McBride added four chapters to Spielberg's life story,
chronicling his extraordinarily active and creative period from 1997
to 2010, a period in which he balanced his executive duties as one of
the partners in the film studio DreamWorks SKG with a remarkable
string of films as a director: Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, A. I.
Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, The Terminal and
Munich--films which expanded his range both stylistically and in terms
of adventurous, often controversial, subject matter. This third
edition brings Spielberg's career up-to-date with material on The
Adventures of Tintin and War Horse. The original edition was praised
by the New York Times Book Review as 'an exemplary portrait' written
with 'impressive detail and sensitivity'; Time called it 'easily the
finest and fairest of the unauthorized biographies of the director.'
Of the second edition, Nigel Morris - author of The Cinema of Steven
Spielberg: Empire of Light - said: 'With this tour de force, McBride
remains the godfather of Spielberg studies.'
Joseph McBride is a film historian and associate professor in
the Cinema department at San Francisco State University. His many
books include Searching for John Ford, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of
Success, Steven Spielberg: A Biography, Hawks on Hawks, Whatever
Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career, as
well as the critical studies John Ford (1974, with Michael Wilmington)
and Orson Welles.
