Bøger af Leo Adam Biga

I'd be an Alexander Payne fan even if we didn't share a Nebraska upbringing: he is a masterly, menschy, singular storyteller whose movies are both serious and unpretentious, delightfully funny and deeply moving. And he's fortunate indeed to have such a thoughtful and insightful chronicler as Leo Biga. --Kurt Andersen, Host of Studio 360. Long before Alexander Payne arrived as a world-renowned filmmaker, Leo Adam Biga spotted his talent, even screening his thesis project, The Passion of Martin, at an art cinema. By the time Payne completed Citizen Ruth and prepped Election Biga made him a special focus of his journalism. Interviewing and profiling and Payne became a highlight of the writer's work. Feeling a rapport and trust with Biga, Payne granted exclusive access to his creative process, including a week-long visit to one of his sets. Now that Payne has moved from emerging to established cinema force through a succession of critically acclaimed and popular projects-About Schmidt, Sideways, and The Descendants-Biga has compiled his years of reporting into this book. It is the first comprehensive look anywhere at one of cinema's most important figures. Go behind-the-scenes with the author to glimpse privileged aspects of the filmmaker at work and in private moments. The book takes the measure of Payne through Biga's analysis, the filmmaker's own words, and insights from some of the writer-director's key collaborators. This must read for any casual fan or serious student of Payne provides in one volume the arc of a remarkable filmmaking journey.

Life was good for Dr. Keith Vrbicky, in 2021. His obstetrics/gynecology practice and tele-medicine business in Norfolk Neb. thrived. A solid faith and family life sustained him and his wife Karyn. Blessed with good health, he endured the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic unscathed. Then things changed in the most dramatic of ways. Despite no history of heart disease, he learned that his heart was in free fall. Within two weeks of being diagnosed as an acute heart failure patient, he was placed on the transplant list. Suddenly, this fit, active physician found himself a bed-ridden, critical care patient requiring a team of experts to determine what was causing his crisis. Next level care kept his other organs from failing so that he could be a candidate to receive a new heart. The only catch: a matching organ had to be found within 48 hours. Miraculously, one became available and he gratefully accepted this gift of life. Through the ordeal, faith and family bolstered his spirits and world class care healed his body. His post-transplant recovery proceeded well enough that he was back to delivering babies and performing surgeries six months later. He's lived to escort a daughter down the aisle and to see another grandchild born. His new mission is to get more people to become organ and tissue donors so that they, too, can give the gift of life.