Gossipy at times, mostly serious about literary life, and always smoothly written.
The acclaimed literary editor and biographer offers an extraordinarily candid autobiography.
Readers hoping for background on how Tomalin (Charles Dickens: A Life, 2011, etc.) chose the subjects of her acclaimed biographies—Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Pepys, Thomas Hardy, among other major figures—may be somewhat disappointed, but this is an elegant, significant book nonetheless. The author does not mention launching biography writing as her vocation until more than halfway through the book. Readers seeking a detailed account of Tomalin’s influential life within British letters will certainly celebrate her honest perceptions of herself, her parents and in-laws, husbands, children, other authors and editors, publishers, tycoons, and other important historical figures. After she married journalist Nick Tomalin, the author’s life felt adventurous almost every day. Nick was a talented writer, a handsome charmer, and a philanderer whose romantic exploits Claire usually tolerated. She undertook extramarital romances, as well, though far fewer than her husband. Still, she and Nick had four children before he died in 1973 during a battle in Israel, where he had been sent on assignment by a British publication. About the period, she writes, “suddenly I found myself living through the most banal of stories, as the neglected wife of a faithless husband….My role now was as the boring suburban wife with too many children who held him back.” As a widow, Tomalin found love with a much younger Martin Amis, among other suitors. She provided for her family with full-time editing jobs (New Statesman, Sunday Times, etc.), part-time freelancing as a literary critic, and her biographies. Her life has also seen tragedy: Her son (“an inspiration to me”) suffers from a lifelong severe physical birth defect as well as learning disabilities, and one of her three daughters committed suicide. At age 60, the author married again, this time to accomplished playwright Michael Frayn.
Gossipy at times, mostly serious about literary life, and always smoothly written.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-56291-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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