Just now, as we begin to slip into a national slumber somewhat akin to that of the Eisenhower years, it’s exhilarating to...
The recusant Beats, like a whiff of cayenne, have a way of gaining your attention, and here they direct their monkey-wrenching, fortifying voices (in 13-part disharmony) at the microphone of poet Meltzer’s tape recorder, conveying a whole lot of history and a bracing handful of ideas and opinions.
Part of this collection was published 30 years ago as The San Francisco Poets, in which five poets (Kenneth Rexroth, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Everson, Michael McClure, and Lew Welch) gave vent to their disarming, discomfiting, disruptive dissent, all the while playful and alive to the vernacular. To this group have been added recent interviews with Diane di Prima, Jack Hirschman, Joanne Kyger, Philip Lamantia, Meltzer, Jack Micheline, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen—plus updates with Ferlinghetti and McClure. Meltzer (Poetics/New College of Calif.) emphasizes the poets’ personal experiences and influences, which collectively is more incandescent than any of Joshua’s light shows: Hemingway, Raphael Soyer, Cocteau, Surrealism, the San Francisco Libertarian Circle, anarchist youth groups, etc. Rexroth is decidedly the most confrontational, talking of music and war and homegrown American radicalism as if his hair was on fire, while Micheline is the rawest (“I lived my poems. More than some of these intellectual bastards”). Welch also speaks of the immediate, when as a cab driver he read some of his work to his colleagues: “Goddamn, Lewie,” one said, “I don’t know whether or not that is a poem, but that is the way it is to drive a cab.” And Ferlinghetti, wonderfully, carries on from 1969 (“I have nothing to say. I haven’t got my crystal spectacles on”) to 1999 (“It’s a technophiliac consciousness that seems to be sweeping the world. And more than that, it’s that huge all-engulfing corporate monoculture”). The Beats, Meltzer urges us to remember, thought more about life than about poetry.
Just now, as we begin to slip into a national slumber somewhat akin to that of the Eisenhower years, it’s exhilarating to have this squall line of Beats pass through our consciousness.Pub Date: June 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-87286-379-4
Page Count: 379
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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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