A fresh and fair assessment of Hemingway’s life and work that refreshingly avoids slipping into hagiography.
With the opening of Cuba’s Hemingway archives in Havana, a Hemingway scholar plunged into two years of research. The result is this original portrait of the author’s life and work.
Going to the “source” after “54 years of Cold War blockade,” New Orleans–based academic Feldman adds extensively to the already massive Hemingway archival material. Cuba—and, in particular, the Finca Vigía that he bought with his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, in 1939—became the center of many things: his writing solace and success; his alternating marital bliss and torment (after Gellhorn, he brought Mary Welsh there, where they lived off and on until his suicide in Idaho in 1961); his heartfelt attachment to the locals and their families; his watering hole and source of fishing adventures; and the ultimate degradation in his health, mostly from drinking. Feldman engagingly traces Hemingway’s remarkable journey as an American writer and mythmaker on many levels. At the same time, he delineates the history of modern Cuba, especially the creation of Havana as a glamorous magnet for rich Americans while it festered in political turbulence, culminating in Fidel Castro’s consolidation of power in 1959. While the sordid details of Hemingway’s affairs, excessive drinking, and brutal treatment of family and friends are familiarly difficult to read, what remains in Feldman’s eloquent, evenhanded biography is a palpable sense of the author’s fierce allegiance to his work, which crushed everything that came in the way, including wives and devoted friends like F. Scott Fitzgerald. Papa’s demons, in the end, caught up with him, leaving many books (Islands in the Stream, A Moveable Feast, True at First Light) unfinished. Feldman concludes with a touching chronicle of how Castro revered the author ("All the work of Hemingway is a defense of human rights") and how the Cubans remember El Americano warmly to this day.
A fresh and fair assessment of Hemingway’s life and work that refreshingly avoids slipping into hagiography.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61219-638-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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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