Part biography, part memoir, Wells' work does much to humanize the man who is often remembered only for his words. A...
Girlhood memories from Wells, William Faulkner’s niece.
In her debut memoir, the author recounts her childhood spent among literary greatness. After her father perished in a plane crash, Dean Faulkner was taken in by her uncle, William, a man “of many faces, literary genius, desperate alcoholic subject to severe bouts of depression, driven early on by the unassuaged fear of failure…” Yet as Wells notes, the acclaimed author was far more complicated than his vices, regularly providing “emotional and financial” support for his young niece, playing the role of loving father. “[M]y family can claim nearly every psychological aberration,” she writes of the Faulkner clan, yet few pages are spent dissecting the “narcissism and nymphomania, alcoholism and anorexia, agoraphobia, manic depression [and] paranoid schizophrenia” to which she alludes. Instead, the author provides insight into the personal life of Faulkner, a rare glimpse into Faulkner the uncle rather than Faulkner the wordsmith. The author eschews discussion of literary theory, instead recounting New Years Eves and Halloweens spent beneath the boughs of Rowan Oak and stories of her “Pappy” (her pet name for her uncle) telling ghost stories to his young relatives, complete with clanking chains at the climactic moments. Wells’ personal tales are the highlight of her book. On occasion, her side stories that explore other branches of the Faulkner family tree tend to veer off course, serving as distraction rather than enlightening anecdotes. The author is at her best when she fixes her gaze solely on her uncle.
Part biography, part memoir, Wells' work does much to humanize the man who is often remembered only for his words. A must-read for Faulkner-philes.Pub Date: March 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59104-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
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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