Thoughtful and well-paced—an illuminating study of the fine but now overlooked poet.
Lucid biography of the eminent English poet, forever on the outside and never quite at home in his own time.
Egremont (Balfour, not reviewed) agrees with Ronald Knox that Siegfried Sassoon was “predominantly ‘a First War man,’ ” profoundly shaped by his experiences in the trenches of France and Belgium. Sassoon was wounded in battle but did not die, unlike his friend Wilfred Owen, who came to be considered the great English poet of the Great War. Sassoon grumbled about this, ungallantly; annoyed that an American anthology of WWI verse had more of Owen’s poems than of his, Sassoon wrote to Edmund Blunden that “the canonisation of Wilfred is still in full swing.” Sassoon was used to feeling snubbed; he was Jewish and gay at a time when British society had little tolerance for such things. As a teenager, he “wanted to conform and from this came affection, sometimes love, for a type he was drawn to all his life: the man of character, not intellect.” So it was for most of his life, though in the late 1920s Sassoon was drawn into the preppy social circle surrounding the wealthy aesthete Stephen Tennant, the so-called Bright Young Thing who provided Evelyn Waugh with satirical ammunition for his early novels. Sassoon was deeply in love with Tennant, but the relationship was turbulent, and in 1933 he married a woman named Hester Gatty. The marriage was not successful, and Sassoon soon “began to loathe her often reasonable demands for love and closeness”; now even more conflicted, he grew withdrawn, conservative and even puritanical, a champion of good-old-days England, old-fashioned in his own time and ever less popular with contemporary readers. His death certificate referred to him as “poet and author retired,” while others remembered him as a “desperately conventional man” who could never be as free as he wished.
Thoughtful and well-paced—an illuminating study of the fine but now overlooked poet.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-26375-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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