Lively and endlessly informative: a welcome addition to literary history, of a piece with Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club...
A graceful, sympathetic portrait of a writer all but forgotten in his day, but now seen as central to understanding the American character.
Delbanco (American Studies/Columbia Univ.; The Real American Dream, 1999, etc.) observes at the outset that Herman Melville left behind little documentary material about his life, even experiences as central as the suicide of his firstborn son; given the classic status accorded to works such as Moby-Dick and The Confidence Man, we tend to forget that he wrote fiction only for a period of about 15 years, turning after the age of 40 to poetry. Delbanco reads Melville’s prose work against the backdrop of American history, remarking that though Melville was born in a world whose rhythms were medieval, he died in one “that had become recognizably our own,” and linking Melville’s themes of quest and conquest, always on morally unstable ground, with the ambiguities of America in its dawning age of Manifest Destiny. In this regard, one of the first acts of American expansionism, Delbanco memorably notes, took place on a Pacific island Melville visited as one of the last practitioners of the preindustrial whaling trade; that work may have been wild, he adds in a luminous detail, but Melville’s shipmates included poets and readers, one of whom counseled, “That’s the way to publish . . . fire it right into ’em; every canto a twenty-four-pound shot; hull the blockheads, whether they will or no.” Melville took the advice, but the blockheads always blocked his way, so that, after the Civil War, he abandoned trying to write for a living and went to work for the Customs Department. Delbanco’s smart readings of Melville’s works, major and minor alike, do much to explain why literature remembers him more generously now.
Lively and endlessly informative: a welcome addition to literary history, of a piece with Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club and David Reynolds’s Walt Whitman’s America.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40314-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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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