Unlike its subject, respectably tame.
Taut biography of the iconic Southern short-story writer and novelist.
Building on scholarly research and O’Connor’s work, biographer/novelist Gooch (English/William Paterson Univ.; Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America, 2002, etc.) delivers a sound appraisal of the author best known for her racially charged, tragicomic, unsentimental portraits of the South. The only child of devoutly Catholic parents, O’Connor (1925–64) was raised among affluent whites in Milledgeville, Ga., where the local penitentiary, insane asylum and elite Georgia State College for Women (she was class of ’45) helped shape her literary landscape. In 1946, O’Connor gained admission to the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her perfectly pitched sagas about religious fanatics and backwoods eccentrics quickly established her as a writer of uncommon talent and reach. O’Connor’s blithe use of the epithet “nigger” in her fiction and vast correspondence also made her a controversial figure in American letters, then and now. Stricken with lupus in her mid-20s, she retreated to Andalusia, her family’s sprawling farm on the outskirts of Milledgeville. There, under the dutiful, if challenging care of her widowed mother, she crafted such scintillatingly sardonic stories as “Good Country People,” “Revelation” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” She also began to breed the exotic peacocks now routinely linked with her name. Gooch offers little that has not been previously examined in scores of works on the larger-than-life author, dead at 39. Nor does he indulge those who like juicy gossip in their literary bios. He gives short shrift to the speculation surrounding O’Connor’s ardent correspondence with lesbian journalist Betty Hester, and quotes the Danish-born textbook salesman who befriended her in the ’50s dismissing rumors of their alleged sexual liaison.
Unlike its subject, respectably tame.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-00066-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
