A devoted, respectful tribute.
A moving compilation of diary entries written during the course of an artistically fruitful three-decade partnership.
Playwright Harold Pinter died from cancer in 2008, soon after winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Historical biographer and novelist Fraser (Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King, 2006, etc.) has edited her diary entries reflecting their compatible life together. Both were in their early 40s and married to other people when they met at a dinner party on Jan. 8, 1975. The two moved in “different worlds”—Fraser, a Catholic aristocrat by birth, was the wife of Tory MP Hugh Fraser, had six children and some years before published her first bestselling history, Mary Queen of Scots; and Pinter, the only child of a Jewish working-class family, had already become wealthy and famous since his 1960 play The Caretaker, and was married to actress Vivien Merchant, with whom he had a son. Their coup de foudre sundered their respective marriages; Vivien descended into alcoholism, Hugh into blithe bachelorhood, as characterized by Fraser, and neither lived many years longer. Pinter embarked on works such as Betrayal, Moonlight and an increasingly political vision; she on novels and celebrated biographies of Charles II and Marie Antoinette, among others. Together they buzzed among the celebrity bees of the age, from London to New York, captured in precious cameos—e.g., Samuel Beckett, Laurence Olivier, Salman Rushdie, Jackie Kennedy, then-child actress Sarah Jessica Parker and Vaclav Havel. They married in 1980, and Fraser reveals delightful details of their writerly life together, such as that Pinter only wrote when struck by inspiration and liked to read his work out loud, and both were voracious readers. Throughout, she celebrates her love for Pinter. “I always wanted to know a genius,” she writes. “I was lured, compelled by a superior force, something drawn out of me by him, which was simply irresistible.”
A devoted, respectful tribute.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-53250-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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