These letters by novelist (The Fountainhead, not reviewed, etc.), political thinker, and all-around, self-described ``intellectual egotist'' Rand (190582) prove oddly revealing of their peculiar, indomitable author. Berliner, the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, has done an admirable job of assembling and editing Rand's letters (though her correspondents' replies are mostly absent); his commentary seems quite judicious, as well. These letters maintain a uniformly strident tone. Whether advancing her career through flattery and opportunism by writing to Cecil B. DeMille, Frank Lloyd Wright, and other notables, or advancing an ersatz philosophy—``Objectivism''—constructed out of anti-communist bromides and specious ratiocination, Rand crafts bracing prose. Most letters concern business in New York and Hollywood, the struggle against ``collectivism,'' and the maintenance of a growing group of fans. Rand often appears almost comically heartless. ``Altruism is the curse of the world,'' she aphorizes early on. Of aesthetic matters she seems insensible. Would-be writers receive banal exhortations to focus on plot and character, and reflections on her novels make them sound more one-dimensional than they are. A steady undercurrent of real pathos flows through this book, however: Rand describes the necessity to exercise self-censorship when writing letters (since lost) to her family, who were suffering tragically under dictatorship in her native Russia. If Rand developed her own authoritarianism, she did so in protective reaction to Stalinism. In her old age, she turns down an opportunity to write on the theme ``the childhood day I will always remember,'' because, she writes, ``what I regard as significant are certain trends and intellectual developments in my childhood, but not single days or events.'' Such chilling passages suggest that the terror which robbed her of her childhood and her family blighted her sensibility as well. Objectivists will find much reinforcement in this volume; more objective readers may find it truly depressing.
Pub Date: June 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93946-6
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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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