Reconstructed memoir of ``my Queerlife'' of the 1970's that's a companion volume to British filmmaker Jarman's At Your Own Risk (1992), which told of his first five decades as well as of his thoughts since testing HIV-positive five years ago. This new book seems to be a faintly updated reprint of diarylike entries published in Britain ten years ago. The leap-about entries recount the gay old pre-AIDS days, during which Jarman nonetheless detested the bourgeois qualities of early gay lib. Occasionally, he climbs off the financial rocks and tries to put together a better script for, and to begin the filming of, his long-delayed Caravaggio, and we get much about Caravaggio as a gay artist (as deduced from his paintings) as well as about Jarman's films-to-be, Sebastiane and Jubilee. Meanwhile, the author's script for The Tempest is funded and goes forward. Entries tend to be ordered more by theme than chronology (they can jump from 1953 to 1984) and feature comments on many famous gays, such as William Burroughs and Pier Paolo Pasolini, whom Jarman clearly sees as heroes (although he often takes issue with Pasolini's lifestyle and sometimes with his films). Retold are Jarman's days at Pinewood Studios when Ken Russell hires him to design The Devils, for which Jarman builds the biggest set since Cleopatra- -until the Hollywood mafia trims it to interiors only. Later, Jarman designs Russell's The Savage Messiah and is driven half-mad faking statues by sculptor Gaudier Brzeska. Many excellent pages, many grandly impolite (if less hostile than At Your Own Risk). (Eighty-eight b&w photographs, including shots of male nudes at low ebb)
Pub Date: July 12, 1993
ISBN: 0-87951-493-0
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1993
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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