An essential document of literary history evoking an era of hope, youth, wisdom, and tragedy.
Brilliant memoir of a sentimental education among the literati of a bygone New York.
Pinckney arrived in Manhattan from his native Indiana a wide-eyed young man who quickly fell under the spell of mentor Elizabeth Hardwick. He was quickly instructed in the art of literary rivalry: “Had I read Allen Tate? A poet I’d never heard of. —You don’t need him. Faulkner? The Bear. —You do need him. But don’t ever do that again. —Excuse me? —Read Lillian.” Hellman, that is, whom Hardwick hated even as she loved Mary McCarthy. Then there was Robert Lowell, Hardwick’s ex-husband, a psychic time bomb; and Robert and Barbara Silvers, editors of the New York Review of Books, who gave budding writer Pinckney room to roam. Young, gay, and Black, Pinckney was discovering a different New York, one in which Susan Sontag might be on one corner and Sid Vicious on the other and in which AIDS was a constant threat. Pinckney writes in pyrotechnic flashes, stringing one memorable episode after another without much connective tissue. His memoir is both stunningly well written and stuffed with dishy gossip. For example, the critic William Empson stuffed his ears with chewing gum to “block out student noise,” then couldn’t get it out. The Silvers’ “never left the office together, at the same time, or shared a taxi,” racing to see who could get to that night’s party first all the same. Stanley Crouch, “wobbly on a bicycle on Second Avenue,” opined that Pinckney had influential White women friends because their husbands weren’t sexually threatened by him. The book is also rich in literary instruction: why one should read Melville and Hawthorne and Woolf, why—Pinckney’s husband, the poet James Fenton, insists—one should read prose and not poetic translations of Dante, and why one shouldn’t trust a word Henry Kissinger writes.
An essential document of literary history evoking an era of hope, youth, wisdom, and tragedy.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-12665-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
