The author of Female Difficulties (1985) offers the second recent biographical love letter (see Paul Perry's Fear and Loathing, p. 1361) to America's notorious outlaw journalist. Unlike Perry, though, Carroll makes the fatal error of imitating her subject's outrageous and hyperbolic style. Carroll interlaces two narratives here—one, a chronological arrangement of oral biographical comments from interviewees; the other, a gonzo piece of fiction about the supposed author of the book, one Laetitia Snap. But Carroll, for all her tough-girl posturing, is no match for her hero. Her rambling interludes written in Snap's voice add up to a tiresome fantasy of innocence deflowered, rough sex, and lots of drugs—not to mention enslavement in a cesspool. Carroll's main narrative tells much the same story as Perry did about Thompson's violent Kentucky youth: the lying and brawling, the arrogance and swaggering, the intolerance and meanness. All of this is redeemed, of course, when Thompson discovers his true talents while writing for an Air Force newspaper. Despite much duplication of Perry, Carroll scores a few coups, most notably a damning interview with Thompson's ex-wife, who tells the sordid truth of her husband's physical abuse and her decline into alcoholism. Carroll's witnesses also debunk a few myths about Thompson's first major book, on the Hell's Angels, but she herself remains a fawning admirer throughout. The most prominent refuseniks among Carroll's potential witnesses were two who could have revealed the most: Thompson's editor, Jann Wenner, and his collaborator, Ralph Steadman. George McGovern, Margot Kidder, Philip Caputo, and George Plimpton stand out for their insightful comments. But the most telling remark is attributed to an anonymous Rolling Stone editor: ``It got old real quick.'' Brace yourselves: A third biography is on the way. Let's hope it's less awestruck than the first two. (Eight pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1993
ISBN: 0-525-93568-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992
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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