A detailed and dogmatic intellectual biography of one of the leading American literary critics, political journalists, polemicists, and Jewish intellectuals of the past 50 years. Alexander (English/Univ. of Washington) seems to have read everything Howe (1920—93) wrote. His tripartite division of Howe’s work (per the subtitle) is useful, though it would have been better had he proceeded strictly thematically, rather than using a chronological approach and shuttling back and forth among his categories. Alexander is most interesting and insightful on Howe as critic, tracing the influence of such intellectual precursors as Matthew Arnold, George Orwell, and Edmund Wilson on Howe’s thinking and writing. Alexander traces Howe’s political evolution from antiwar Trotskyist polemicist in the early 1940s to a much more nuanced social democrat who cofounded Dissent in 1954 and battled the New Left during the late 1960s and early ’70s. Unfortunately, Alexander’s analysis of Howe’s political views too often is tendentious or otherwise rhetorically overcharged. Alexander praises Howe’s Jewish commitments, particularly the six anthologies on which he collaborated with the American Yiddish journalist Eliezer Greenberg, though he has some justifiable reservations about the exclusion of a discussion of synagogue and other religious life among Lower East Side immigrants in World of Our Fathers. But when it comes to Howe’s writings on Israel, particularly his pro—Peace Now pieces from 1979 until his death, Alexander waxes hysterical. He makes the untenable charge that Howe became involved in “anti-Israeli American Jewish politics”—untenable unless all critiques of Israeli policies are deemed “anti-Israeli.” In Alexander, Howe has found as rigorous, and sometimes sardonic, a biographer as he himself was a writer. But he also deserved someone far more attuned to all the dimensions of his life and his political commitments.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-253-33364-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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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