Lively survey of American writers in Paris from the liberation in 1944 through 1960, ending with the invasion of the Beats. Sawyer-Lauáanno (The Invisible Spectator, 1989's fine bio of Paul Bowles) opens with a bang as war-journalist Ernest Hemingway liberates the Ritz bar, steals future wife Mary Welsh from Pfc. Irwin Shaw, fences with AndrÇ Malraux about their war adventures, insults William Saroyan, lit-chats with J.D. Salinger, visits Picasso. Janet Flanner of The New Yorker writes movingly of Paris's returning POWs, forced laborers, and survivors of the concentration camps, and of the sobs, speechless anger, profound shock, and horror of the Parisians. Gertrude Stein gets off her grand likes and dislikes, peppered with anti-Semitic remarks, and tells new arrival Richard Wright that ``it is obvious that you and I are the only two geniuses of this era.'' Wright's is a chosen exile and he soon finds himself rejected in America, lauded in Europe. He's followed by fellow exiles James Baldwin and Chester Himes, and Baldwin sets out to slay Wright and become the leading black American writer. Dirty-books publisher Maurice Dirodias's Olympia Press gives a solid berth to Alexander Trocchi, Terry Southern, J.P. Donleavy, and Vladimir Nabokov. George Plimpton (his dirty book is turned down by Girodias) starts up The Paris Review with Harold (Doc) Humes, Peter Matthiessen, William Styron, Southern, Robert Bly, and Evan S. Connell, among other contributors. Sawyer- Lauáanno calls the early history of The Paris Review ``in many ways the story of the Parisian expatriate literary community itself.'' Celebrated war-novelist James Jones is on hand, as are Harry Mathews, John Ashbery, and Susan Sontag, while Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs hole up in a stinking, scummy, hideously decaying hotel to edit Naked Lunch. Intelligently done. Lively capsule histories lend zest to each writer's empowering Paris years. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs- -not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8021-1371-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
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
PERSPECTIVES
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