A riveting account of a gentle man overwhelmed by one of the waves of American hysteria that occasionally obliterate our...
A poignant, distressing portrait of Arvin (1900–63), one of our premier literary critics, whose distinguished career as a professor and writer was destroyed by the revelation of his homosexuality.
Werth (Damages, 1998, etc.) employs his considerable reportorial and narrative skills to relate the sad case of Arvin, whose 37-year teaching career at Smith College and whose trenchant studies of Hawthorne and Herman Melville (among others) had earned him a peerless reputation in the groves of academe as well as in the larger literary world. The story begins on September 2, 1960, when the police arrive at Arvin’s door in Northampton, Mass., to arrest him for possession of pornography (a felony under Massachusetts law at the time). Faced with the very real possibility of a prison sentence, Arvin became an informer and gave police the names of others involved in what became known as the “Smith College Homosexual Scandal of 1960.” Werth then leaps back to 1924—the year Arvin arrived at Smith—and proceeds to outline his swift, astonishing ascent to the very pinnacle of his profession. Arvin’s friends—Van Wyck Brooks, Carson McCullers, Edmund Wilson, Granville Hicks, F. O. Matthiessen, and Sylvia Plath—were a veritable Who’s Who of American literature. And the friendships weren’t entirely intellectual, either: One of Arvin’s lovers was Truman Capote, with whom he had a passionate two-year relationship and whose undying devotion supported him in his most trying times. Arvin had psychological problems throughout his life; he was institutionalized many times and in 1952 underwent a course of electroshock treatments. In the grim anti-gay decades of the mid-20th century, he had tried to live as a heterosexual (a marriage, a divorce) and as a closeted homosexual—decisions that shredded him psychologically. But when he could work, he worked spectacularly well (his study of Melville won a National Book Award). Werth devotes the final third of his book to the public humiliation of Arvin and some of his gay colleagues and ends with a brief update on the careers of the principals involved.
A riveting account of a gentle man overwhelmed by one of the waves of American hysteria that occasionally obliterate our national common sense.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-49468-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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