A rich trove for literary archaeologists in search of artifacts from the Beat epoch.
An informative, comprehensive account of one woman’s rise in the literary underground, ripe with the flavors and transformations of the Beat Generation.
San Francisco poet di Prima (Loba, not reviewed) is considered the most prominent woman among the “beatniks” (Corso, Kerouac, Ginsberg et al.) of the 1950s. Her unconventional career, however, was hardly forecast by a 1930s girlhood filled with violence and foreboding, in which the bright child was alternately confused and tormented by her strict Italian family and the cruel Brooklyn streets. After an unsatisfying year at Swarthmore, she dropped out and began to move with a small circle of estranged nonconformists in rundown Manhattan locales, where they experimented with sex, drugs, and art. The author brings a relentless acuity to her depiction of sensual, chaotic times, and she is astute in her portrayal of the awkward place women occupied in this bohemian hierarchy. She produces a sharp sense of the creative collisions of the day—involving figures as diverse as Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, Le Roi Jones, Charlie Parker, Merce Cunningham, Martin Landau, and Audre Lorde—and of the Beats’ sense of embattlement against a repressive city and police. While not exactly stream-of-consciousness, strongly evocative passages alternate throughout with ones that might have been trimmed. Many of the recollections of di Prima’s early years are warm and affectionate, as are her reminiscences of her first lover (a gentle, literate longshoreman twice her age). The author also details her circle’s founding of important small presses, theater companies, and other cultural outlets.
A rich trove for literary archaeologists in search of artifacts from the Beat epoch.Pub Date: April 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-85166-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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.
