A well-organized and sensitive portrait of a writer living to the fullest in his own time but always desirous of a “paradise...
A fresh biography of the great American writer.
Early on in this engaging portrait, Brown (History/Elizabethtown Coll.; Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing, 2009, etc.) draws our attention to two of Fitzgerald’s homes: an 1842 Greek Revival mansion alongside the Delaware River and a “rambling Victorian” north of Baltimore. For Brown, they personify a key theme in Fitzgerald’s life: a consistent yearning for America’s glorious past. Fitzgerald was a writer who beautifully captured his own time, the flapper-filled Jazz Age, while still being deeply influenced by his patrician father. Fitzgerald’s personal favorite, Tender Is the Night, with its aristocratic father, Dick Diver, “captures Fitzgerald’s historical vision more completely than anything else he ever wrote.” Brown draws extensively on the autobiographical aspects of Fitzgerald’s novels and stories. He also downplays Fitzgerald’s alcohol abuse. Despite being a lackluster student, he got into Princeton on sheer will power. He struggled there, too, but his close friendship with fellow student John Peale Bishop stimulated his love of literature and reading. After marrying Zelda Sayre, his work flourished. During the Depression, he published 65 stories in the Saturday Evening Post at $4,000 each. Shepherded by Maxwell Perkins, a young editor at Scribner, who would later become a close friend, confidant, and moneylender, Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise closely followed by the “confessional” The Beautiful and the Damned. Brown suggests that The Great Gatsby was composed in the shadow of Joseph Conrad, and Tender Is the Night was his “masterwork.” Fitzgerald died in 1940 of a heart attack in the “hideous town” of Hollywood, still working. The Last Tycoon was published a year later.
A well-organized and sensitive portrait of a writer living to the fullest in his own time but always desirous of a “paradise lost.”Pub Date: May 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-674-50482-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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