Well-researched, comprehensive, and essential to understanding the artist and the artistry. (31 b&w photos, not seen)
A major new biography of the poet known for his fondness for the lower-case, the fractured word (and line), the idiosyncratic spelling, the prefix un-, the arresting phrase, and—later on—anti-Semitism.
Sawyer-Lauçanno (Writer-in-Residence/M.I.T.; The Continual Pilgrimage: American Writers in Paris, 1992, etc.) here takes on a most compelling subject. Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962) was the son of a powerful father—a Harvard professor, a Congregationalist minister, a man so handy he built houses—and an unfailingly supportive mother. He crafted careers in both poetry and painting, neither lucrative until near the end, and led a life with some moments so truly bizarre that they could have sated even today’s voracious tabloid-TV news. Cummings’s father was killed in a snowstorm when a train cut his car in half moments after he’d stopped to clear the windshield. Cummings had sexual relations and a child with a good friend’s wife, whom he subsequently married, then divorced. His daughter grew up not knowing the identity of her father, and when she met him years later, she felt an attraction . . . then learned the news. Traditional in design, the biography begins with the poet’s death, retreats to his birth, advances toward his death, ends with some paragraphs about his legacy. The volume, featuring as much praise as analysis, reads at times almost like a 19th-century “life.” Cummings was, declares the author, “a masterful lyric poet, and, quite simply, the master of the love poem.” Similar encomiums appear just about anytime Sawyer-Lauçanno discusses Cummings’s work. Moreover, until near the end, when he finally chides the poet, he suggests others were to blame for Cummings’s personal failings. When he abandons his role as apologist, however, the author has many bright things to say about the poems and their gifted creator.
Well-researched, comprehensive, and essential to understanding the artist and the artistry. (31 b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-57071-775-3
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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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