And without that mitigating achievement, this author’s life, retold at excruciating length, seems merely a sad, sordid waste.
Overly detailed biography of the critically esteemed author limns every up and down in his self-destructive life.
Mind you, there’s no way to write about Richard Yates (1926–92) without spending a lot of time describing alcoholic seizures, nervous breakdowns, and ghastly coughing fits resulting from lung damage sustained during WWII and exacerbated by heavy smoking. The son of ill-matched parents who split when he was three, Yates hardly ever saw his father after the divorce and grew up to despise his feckless, alcoholic mother. Yates seems never to have recovered from his dreadful childhood, and although his early short stories won him a devoted literary agent (Monica McCall) and some magazine sales, their bleak point of view was already prompting the uneasy reactions that would always limit his commercial success, though fellow writers were—and continue to be—awed by the elegance, economy, and bitter honesty of his prose. Revolutionary Road, nominated for a National Book Award in 1961, cemented his reputation as a painfully acute observer of the discontents of the American middle class, but it took him eight years to write its flawed successor, A Special Providence, and his personal demons increasingly dominated his life. Although he recovered his artistic equilibrium in the’70s with Disturbing the Peace and The Easter Parade, Yates was almost always broke and lived in horrifying squalor. A shuffling, shabby, prematurely old man, he died at 66 when his abused body failed to recover from minor surgery. Bailey (The Sixties, not reviewed) tells this heartbreaking story adequately, writing smoothly about Yates’s two failed marriages, his devotion to his three daughters, his friendships with various literary figures (Seymour Lawrence and Andre Dubus among them), his influence on his creative-writing students as an exemplar of the committed artist. But though he spends many pages quibbling with bad reviews, the biographer doesn’t really convey the qualities that make Yates’s work so distinctive.
And without that mitigating achievement, this author’s life, retold at excruciating length, seems merely a sad, sordid waste.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-28721-6
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
SEEN & HEARD
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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