An unauthorized (and the first full-length) biography of the grande dame of southern literature succeeds only partially in its daunting task: to shed light on the personal life of an intensely private woman who prefers that her work speak for itself. Faced with Welty’s polite but firm refusal to cooperate, Waldron (Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist, 1993) perseveres where several potential biographers quit. Shut out by Welty’s friends, she gleans what she can from letters, other writers’ biographies, and distant acquaintances. Welty’s autobiographical writing—One Writer’s Beginnings and prefaces to her photography collections—provides additional background already known to devotees. Waldron’s main accomplishment is consolidating the writer’s far-flung commentary on her work from newspapers and writing-anthology interviews. Waldron remains respectful, even when entertaining speculation about the unmarried writer’s sexuality, including the nature of her intense friendship with British writer Elizabeth Bowen, or her difficult relationship with her mother. The literary influence of Katherine Anne Porter and agent Diarmuid Russell are detailed, as is Welty’s antipathy for Carson McCullers. Revelations are generally minor (her first book, A Curtain of Green, was titled by her publisher’s sales staff, for example), but there are genuine insights. Examining the society column Welty wrote in the 1930s for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, Waldron sees “flashes of the wit and the eye for detail, even the feeling for family, that would distinguish Eudora’s fiction.” She finds it notable that, despite familiarity with upper-class society, Welty “did not become the Edith Wharton of Jackson,” a chronicler of belles and balls, but wrote about poor whites and blacks she met on her travels as a WPA publicist. The chapter on Welty’s WPA work illustrates what is perhaps an unavoidable shortcoming (but a shortcoming nonetheless): Waldron’s research yields barely three pages on this important formative period. A passable introduction to a hugely important writer—more a starting point than a comprehensive summing up. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-47647-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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