Prone to benign mischief, a literary twinkle in the eye, Buckley nails his targets more often than not yet likewise has fun...
Buckley (They Eat Puppies, Don't They?, 2012, etc.) offers stylishness and nimble wordplay in this latest collection of (generally) lightweight ruminations on contemporary culture and its foibles.
The author caroms from personal history and travel to criticism and politics, wielding a sense of humor that pirouettes from gentle to sardonic. His subjects sometimes seem too trivial to merit inclusion, and his takes on these absurdities are amusing but instantly forgettable. Yet such is the nature of the beast; most of these brief, previously published magazine essays never were intended to be more than mildly diverting, and a blithe tenor is arguably the right approach in skewering some of the more outlandish affronts. At the other end of the spectrum, seeming almost out of place in this volume, is his stark chronicle of touring Auschwitz. The strongest chapter of the book is “Farewells,” featuring Buckley's posthumous remembrances of such longtime friends as Joseph Heller and Christopher Hitchens, not to mention his father William F. Buckley's celebrated nemesis, Gore Vidal. These pieces are especially revealing, often touching, and find Buckley dispensing with his breezy tone for a timbre that is much more sober. Particularly poignant is his piece on Hitchens, a man he revered. Given their due in the “Criticism” section, among others, are Graham Greene, P.G. Wodehouse and Ray Bradbury. Buckley's outstanding introduction to The Stories of Ray Bradbury (2010) is a richly deserved paean to one of the most influential writers of the late 20th century. Though a clear and self-deprecating writer, Buckley sometimes wears his erudition on his sleeve, echoing his late father's penchant for extravagant polysyllabic effusions—e.g., “chrestomathies,” “diapasons,” “froideurs” and “vernissages.” Secure a dictionary.
Prone to benign mischief, a literary twinkle in the eye, Buckley nails his targets more often than not yet likewise has fun with unexpected asides, like the “excruciatingly chaste” plays of the otherwise notorious Marquis de Sade.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4951-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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