The successor to Booknotes: Writers and Their Stories from C-SPAN’s Author Interviews (1997) is more unified and satisfying. Scouring ten years of interviews from his C-SPAN program, Lamb has assembled a collection of subjects spanning three centuries and two continents. While the emphasis falls on US statesmen and public figures (Will Rogers, Thomas Edison), international names like Marcel Proust and F.A. Hayek also appear, as well as a young heroin addict named Rosa Lee Cunningham. The focus on one genre unifies the work neatly, and insights into the subjects and biographers keep the work surprising. For example, Susan B. Anthony was a youthful beauty; Rutherford B. Hayes is an underappreciated president who prefigured the Progressive era; Calvin Coolidge was a fine writer, even in the opinion of Mencken. Common threads among the biographers are many. One is time invested: several years is not uncommon. Another is intimacy with the subject. The result for some, like Walter Isaacson (on Henry Kissinger), is equivocation: praise for Kissinger’s “ability to understand linkages in foreign policy,” but criticism of his shortsightedness in not grasping the power of “the openness and the values of our [democratic] system.” For others there is a fearful closeness. Sylvia Jukes Morris dreamed for months of her subject Clare Boothe Luce, with one dream making Luce a stripper in a vaudeville show, ready to expose herself as Morris was exposing her in the biography. But many left their books with increased respect for their subject. “I think I would have loved him,” said Denis Bryan of Albert Einstein. Concluded David McCullough of Harry S. Truman, “I would not only vote for him, I’d go out and work hard to see that he was elected. . . . He accomplished things.” Everyone in the book’subjects and biographers—accomplished things, and their endeavors make this book appealing. (Author tour,)
Pub Date: March 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-8129-3081-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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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