This moving memoir by the famous poet’s son pulls no punches: James Dickey was a hard-drinking, prevaricating braggart whose bad behavior destroyed his family. Even so, to Christopher Dickey he was “father-poet-god” whom he loved in spite of his anger and bitterness. There was a reconciliation of sorts between Dickey and his son, Christopher (Innocent Blood, 1997, etc.), in the year or so prior to his death in January 1997. Christopher had limited contact with his father for nearly 20 years following the death of his mother in 1976. Dickey had a history of drunken loutishness and philandering; his son believes it was that and a mean-spirited neglect that drove his mother to drink herself to death. Two months after her funeral, Dickey married a student younger than Christopher. “I read about it in People,” writes the son. By all accounts, it was a violent marriage that included batterings and stabbings—of Dickey by his young, drug-addicted wife. Things started to unravel for the family, according to Christopher, with the widespread success of Deliverance and the film made from the novel. The younger Dickey was a stand-in during the filming and got a close-up view of his father’s dealings with director John Boorman and actors Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight. Dickey would leave the set in a snit: “Boorman had said he was interfering too much. Said the actors were upset by his presence.” He would return, of course, and play a memorable part as the sheriff. But for the younger Dickey, his father’s embarrassing, obnoxious behavior was only outdone by his “righteous fury” at his father for “settling for less . . . for artistic compromises” in the making of the film. Dickey’s latter years saw him alternate between the celebrated, half-mad poet he had been and the sick, pathetic drunkard he became. An amazing portrait of a man who was a destructive force with a larger-than-life ego and who was also a man of intense passion, high intellect, and a delicate, artistic sensitivity. (First serial to the New Yorker)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-84202-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
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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