Here, the odd, legendary, and passionate collaboration between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas is eyed with detailed objectivity by London critic Souhami (Gluck: Her Biography, 1989- -not reviewed). ``Gertrude and Alice made a strange looking pair,'' Souhami begins. She calls them ``indomitable,'' ``so emphatically and uncompromisingly themselves that the world could do nothing less than accept them as they were.'' Both children of Jewish immigrants raised near San Francisco, they met in Paris in 1907 when Gertrude was writing The Making of Americans, living with her brother Leo, and collecting the paintings of Matisse and Picasso that first drew the avant-garde to her door. Souhami maps the workings of their 39- year relationship, while giving a sense of Gertrude's voice by quoting her work. ``Their deepest point of agreement, and the focus of much of their shared life, was that Gertrude was a genius,'' the author says, quoting Gertrude as saying, ``Twentieth-century literature is Gertrude Stein.'' According to Souhami, Gertrude, with ``huge personality'' and ``easy laughter,'' wrote, talked, and thought; ``sharp'' Alice ``did the rest.'' But far beyond the daily typing of manuscripts, Alice stood as ``the power behind the throne,'' managing and promoting their mutual image, even publishing Gertrude's writings. Souhami's nonjudgmental (sometimes witty) reporting serves the reader well by scrutinizing this idiosyncratic pairing in all aspects, appealing and not. During WW I, Stein and Toklas distributed supplies to French hospitals. During WW II, they supported resistance fighters, but also used the protection of Bernard Fay (later imprisoned as a collaborator) to stay in France. After Stein's death in 1946, Toklas courageously carried on, her income at times withheld by the Stein family, her apartment walls stripped of the famous paintings. The engaging backstage story to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—and, surprisingly, the first Stein biography in more than a decade. Photographs by Man Ray and Cecil Beaton stand out among 45 illustrations that convey Stein and her world.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-04-440833-1
Page Count: 308
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
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
PERSPECTIVES
© 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.
