A worthy introduction to an adventurous life.
Fast-paced biography of the daredevil war photographer who died in combat at age 40.
Kershaw (Jack London, 1998) relies heavily on Robert Capa’s 1947 memoir Slightly Out of Focus and the Richard Whelan’s 1985 biography, as well as other readily available sources. But he also conducted interviews with those who knew Capa, killed so young while photographing the French war in Vietnam during 1954. Born Andre Friedmann in 1913, part of a Hungarian Jewish family in modest circumstances, he left as a political refugee while still a teenager. He made it as far as Berlin, where he found a job as a darkroom assistant. Picking up a camera, the youngster became entranced with photography and quickly showed a talent for shooting original pictures. He broke through with stunning images of political rallies, then wound up with shooting assignments throughout Europe. He changed his name to Robert Capa because he thought it sounded punchy, memorable, and American. Faithfully following chronology, Kershaw relates how Capa achieved international fame during the Spanish Civil War with “The Falling Soldier,” judiciously laying out the contradictory evidence as to whether the picture was authentic or staged. The author never loses sight of Capa's professional life, notable not only for the quality of the photographs but also the fearlessness he exhibited on battlefields around the world. Just as doggedly, Kershaw devotes substantial space to Capa’s high-profile womanizing (especially with the married Ingrid Bergman), gambling addiction, collaborations on word/picture books, and friendships with famous writers (especially John Steinbeck and Irwin Shaw), as well as the wanderlust that kept him from ever settling down. The analysis of Capa’s motivations is often insightful and rarely overbearing.
A worthy introduction to an adventurous life.Pub Date: July 23, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31564-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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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