These richly detailed and forthright interviews offer unique perspectives on the inspirations and creativity of writers.
Notable writers talk candidly about their lives and work.
Lamb (co-editor: The Supreme Court: A C-SPAN Book Featuring the Justices in their Own Words, 2010, etc.) and his C-SPAN staff have selected interviews from the past 25 years of Q&A and Booknotes, two long-running shows featuring conversations with authors of nonfiction. Edited into the form of cogent essays, these conversations reveal writers’ motivations for choosing their subjects, challenges in doing research and their own surprising discoveries. Readers are likely to recognize some of the more famous writers—e.g., historian David McCullough, who discusses 19th-century American artists who moved to Paris at a time when Europeans were flocking to the United States; British writer Simon Winchester, who talks about his first visit to America in 1963 and the “amazingly hospitable and generous” people he met; and journalist Malcolm Gladwell, who recalls the quiet, circumscribed childhood in southwest Ontario that fueled his insatiable curiosity. “When I got to college,” he says, “I realized that there was a virtually limitless amount of cool things to learn about the world.” Christopher Hitchens, in his final interview before his death, talks movingly about having esophageal cancer, the disease that killed his father, and his hope for bold new treatments. Several writers—Michael Lewis, Bethany McLean and Gretchen Morgenson—reflect on the financial crisis of 2007. Journalists Roger Mudd and Ken Auletta are among the writers who discuss the responsibilities of the media in contemporary society. In a section on post-9/11 America, Kenneth Feinberg, who worked to mediate claims from veterans exposed to Agent Orange, talks about his similar role as “Special Master” with authority to delegate funds to victims’ families. The experience, he says, changed him dramatically: “I’m much more fatalistic after 9/11. I don’t think I’ll ever plan more than two weeks ahead.”
These richly detailed and forthright interviews offer unique perspectives on the inspirations and creativity of writers.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-348-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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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