by Duncan Fallowell ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 21, 2013
A delicious throwback memoir, writerly and rich.
In five dated yet beautifully crafted essays, Fallowell (Going as Far as I Can: The Ultimate Travel Book, 2008, etc.) mines some early trips he took for literary inspiration.
The destinations included sparsely populated Gozo, Malta and the southeastern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The author also searched for the fabulously wealthy buyer of a Scottish island, Maruma, who made art with “fire energy” and hunted for the inspiration behind the character Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Fallowell’s essays take a sweet, circuitous route, which he self-consciously describes as “a progressive revelation, as a painter starting with a few lines scattered about the canvas will eventually end up with a portrait as complete as he can make it.” The author drops hints that then reappear to guide him on his pursuits, such as happening upon an entry in The Indian Yearbook 1941-2—while stoned out of his mind in Ooty in 1975—for a woman named Bapsy Pavry who seemed to encapsulate an entire era of British imperial organization and who haunted the author for the next 20 years. Fallowell’s hopeless pursuit of Maruma in the summer of 1995, luring the author fruitlessly to the Isle of Eigg to meet him, inspires a virtuosic dissertation on the subject of the archaeological sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The author’s odd journalistic persecution of the shut-in Alastair Graham, living in quiet solitude in Wales, exposes more about the sexual proclivities of the author than the once-darling “it” boy and intimate of Waugh. Fallowell ends with a swooning chronicle of London’s mad grief at the death of Princess Diana (“Beyond the Blue Horizon”).
A delicious throwback memoir, writerly and rich.Pub Date: June 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-299-29240-9
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Terrace Books/Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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