Some somber new brushstrokes darken an already dismal painting. (37 b&w illustrations)
Another examination of the passion, poetry, infidelity, depression, ambition, lies, and suffering that have made Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath the most notorious couple in modern literary history.
Middlebrook (Anne Sexton, 1991, etc.) did much research for this latest brick in the now-imposing edifice of material about Plath and Hughes. She examined the Hughes papers, now available to scholars at Emory University, as well as the Plath archive at Smith College. She refers early and often, as well, to Hughes’s two 1998 volumes dealing with Plath, Birthday Letters and the lesser-known Howls and Whispers, which appeared in an edition of 110 copies. Middlebrook endeavors to withhold judgment about Hughes’s behavior with Plath and her successors, but his actions as a serial adulterer speak quite eloquently. As does his poetry, from which the author quotes liberally. She speculates about the “disappearance” of some key Plath material, about the contents of a trunk at Emory that cannot be opened until 2023, and about the causes of Plath’s 1963 suicide. Her conclusion about the latter? Depression—hardly a novel insight. Middlebrook begins with the 1956 meeting of her two principals and then moves steadily forward to Hughes’s 1998 death from heart failure and cancer, though some chapters loop to revisit and modify earlier segments. The author makes insightful comments about each poet’s writing, about their individual artistic growth, and about their collaborations: before their break-up, in their impecunious days, they regularly read each other’s work and even composed at the same table. Middlebrook sensitively shows how each helped fashion the other, though some of her psychological observations sound a bit loopy, e.g., he is a “poet-shaman, journeying in the psychological murk of fear and detestation of the female.”
Some somber new brushstrokes darken an already dismal painting. (37 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03187-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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
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