Although the Gelbs deeply admire O’Neill’s talents, they portray the same cruel and desperately unhappy man who emerges from...
A biography of the playwright who was haunted by three wives and his mother.
Arthur Gelb (1924-2014), who served as managing editor of the New York Times, and his wife, Barbara, have devoted their careers to chronicling the life of Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953). In 1962, their 964-page O’Neill was published after they were approached by a publisher who knew they admired O’Neill’s plays. At the time, little was known about the playwright whose works were being revived on Broadway, to great acclaim, and the Gelbs wondered how much the plays were based on his life. In the next decades, they revised the biography several times and then, in 2000, published O’Neill: Life with Monte Cristo, intended to be the first of three volumes updating their original biography with newly available archival sources. Since the publication of their first biography, however, O’Neill has been the subject of much attention: studies of his work habits; correspondence with his editor, Saxe Commins, film producer Kenneth Macgowan, and theater critic George Jean Nathan; a two-volume biography by Louis Sheaffer; O’Neill’s Creative Struggle by Doris Alexander; and most recently, an excellent biography by Robert Dowling (Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts, 2014). The Gelbs’ new portrait embellishes, but does not alter, the image of O’Neill revealed elsewhere: a man beset by demons, especially “the terror evoked” by his mother’s “morphine-induced tantrums” as he was growing up, which the Gelbs thought they had not sufficiently examined. He was an alcoholic, treated his wives abusively, and neglected his children, especially his unwanted son Shane, who was subjected to his father’s “stony anger” and whom O’Neill disinherited, along with his sister, Oona. The authors draw on extensive interviews with O’Neill’s melodramatic, often spiteful third wife, Carlotta, to convey the volatility of their marriage. In his plays, they argue, O’Neill created “a family dynasty” that replaced his actual family.
Although the Gelbs deeply admire O’Neill’s talents, they portray the same cruel and desperately unhappy man who emerges from many other biographies.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-15911-4
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Marian Wood/Putnam
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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