An unremarkable correspondence between two remarkable southern men of letters at the forefronts of the New Critics and the Fugitive poets, respectively. Hopes for finding nascent critical insights and personal revelations quickly dim while reading over the shoulders of these two giants during four decades of friendship. As editor of the seminal Fugitive and a poet in the Agrarian movement, Tate had an established reputation when he first solicited an article from fellow Vanderbilt graduate Brooks, whose career had just begun to rise. Their early exchanges are only marginal to their assorted writings, however, and they switch mainly to topics of interest to mutual friends rather than posterity. Thus, one finds the ordinary dynamics of academic careers—who’s on top at Louisiana State University, which graduate protÇgÇ needs a lectureship, what permissions are cleared for which anthology—and the internecine relations of schools of poetry and criticism—John Crowe Ransom’s revisions, I.A. Richards’s scientific outlook on literature, the latest Modern Language Association feud. Tate and Brooks prove to be both impassioned partisans and seasoned campaigners. By the time Brooks settles down at Yale, where his and Robert “Red” Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry was adopted as a standard text, and Tate begins his collegiate wanderings, they have taken on Van Wyck Brooks, the LSU faculty, the MLA convention, and the whole Ivy League. “It’s my considered opinion,” Brooks wrote to Tate, “that in academic matters one ought never use the rapier when the meat-axe will do.” The juiciest description of a faculty brawl surprisingly turns out to an Albee-esque melÇe between Penn Warren’s fiery first wife and Brooks’s spouse. Near their correspondence’s end Brooks confesses, “Letters, I find—at least the letter that I have to dash off—are not an adequate substitute for real conversation.” Or, in this case, material for literary eavesdropping, either.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8262-1207-7
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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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