Thorough, intelligent and respectful, but more bite would have released more of Updike’s blood.
A sympathetic, full-meal-deal biography—life, literary works, reputation—of John Updike (1932–2009), who was considered by many to be the most talented of his generation.
Former New York Observer books editor Begley (Certitude: A Profusely Illustrated Guide to Blockheads and Bullheads, Past and Present, 2009, etc.) erects his formidable edifice on a sturdy foundation of research and convention. He interviewed the relevant relatives and friends, trod the ground in Pennsylvania (Updike’s state of birth and youth), Massachusetts and elsewhere, and read all the works of Updike’s most prolific career. Begley begins in Berks County, Pa., and shows us Updike’s town-and-country boyhood, a time filled with reading and drawing and observing. His father was a public school teacher (see Updike’s The Centaur); his mother, a homemaker and writer (she published in the New Yorker—like her son and grandson—and wrote novels). We see Updike’s stellar schoolboy academic record and his matriculation at Harvard, where he earned a spot on the Harvard Lampoon staff and where he displayed the astonishing work ethic, creativity and precocity that would—while still in his 20s—earn him a staff position on the New Yorker and a lifelong publishing relationship with Alfred A. Knopf. Begley also shows us how Updike repeatedly mined his own experiences, populating his fiction with people like those in his own social circle (including his wives and many lovers). Perhaps too frequently, the author summarizes and explicates numerous of his works (including Updike’s poems and essays) and throughout displays a patent admiration, even affection, for his subject. He suggests that Updike’s conservative social positions (on civil rights, on Vietnam) were sometimes born of a desire to be contrarian rather than of actual conviction.
Thorough, intelligent and respectful, but more bite would have released more of Updike’s blood.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-189645-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
