Mostly standard writing advice, minus the bullet points, plus the gleanings from a lifetime of reading and thought.
A veteran editor, teacher, and author assembles some advice for aspiring writers of fiction.
Cohen (Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of the Star that Gives Us Life, 2010, etc.) tells us that his new volume began “as an outflow of my university teaching,” and in some ways, the lecturer’s tone remains. For each of his points, the author mines his own vast reading, with names like Tolstoy, Twain, Updike, Dickens, Eliot, and other notables appearing continually, and he has a fondness for occasionally declaring what is the best: James Wood is the best book critic today (difficult to argue with that); F.L. Lucas’ Style is the best book about rhythm and writing. Cohen’s myriads of examples are lush and instructive though sometimes quite elementary. He takes a little time, for example, to explain what iambic pentameter is; it’s hard to imagine that the readers of this book would not know such a thing. Organized topically—beginnings, point of view, dialogue, rhythm, sex, endings—the book generally surveys the literary history of the topic, offers some prescriptions and proscriptions, and concludes with some advice for the novice—e.g., “simple clear prose is not the only way to write, but it is the best.” Along the way, Cohen delivers a few sharp jabs at some writers—Michael Holroyd’s writing, he writes, has grown “slipshod”—but for the most part, he is a generous tour guide through his literary world and generally favors positive over negative examples—though there are plenty of the latter. Perhaps most engaging are Cohen’s occasional anecdotes about his own experiences as a writer and editor and—in one extensive case—literary friend: he tells a fine story about how Richard Holmes developed the idea for his Footsteps (1985).
Mostly standard writing advice, minus the bullet points, plus the gleanings from a lifetime of reading and thought.Pub Date: May 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9830-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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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