A candid, intimate and touching portrait of the author's masculine forebears, composed in nimble prose.
A sprightly memoir about the succession of cranky, writerly Waugh men, concluding with the author (born 1963).
The most famous Waugh was of course Evelyn, author of Brideshead Revisted and many other novels, who died in 1966. Older brother Alec was notorious for his novel The Loom of Youth (1917); son Auberon (Alexander’s father) was a well-known journalist for the Daily Telegraph for nearly 40 years. Alexander, member of the family’s fourth generation of authors and critics, writes frankly and sweepingly of the often deeply ambivalent feelings between Waugh fathers and sons. He begins with “the Brute”: sadistic, Victorian Dr. Alexander Waugh, a country doctor who bullied son Arthur for his asthmatic weakness. Arthur, in turn, grew passionate about dramatics and a literary career, established himself in London and was eventually noted for his literary criticism and work as a managing director of Chapman and Hall. The careers of Arthur’s two sons form the most compelling chapters here; favorite Alec and irritable Evelyn are portrayed in knee-slapping good stories that spare no one’s feelings. Expelled from Sherborne for homosexual activity, Alec enjoyed some early literary successes but was forced to recognize that his younger brother was the better writer. Evelyn, despite great professional and financial successes, never quite won his father’s love, and indeed waged continual, patricidal literary war against him. Auberon, Evelyn’s first-born son, developed a hatred for discipline and became an accomplished liar. He died in 2001, and Alexander describes his final days with great pathos: “I had not kissed my father since I was twelve years old and had never said ‘I love you’ to him, even as a boy…we never, in all our time together, had a single serious conversation. He had not trained me for it.”
A candid, intimate and touching portrait of the author's masculine forebears, composed in nimble prose.Pub Date: May 29, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52150-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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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