A hard-working life of a hard-working, justly honored writer, very well told.
Illuminating life of the author of such works as The Collector and The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
The “two worlds” of the subtitle could be subdivided, multiplied, and variously reassigned: John Fowles the country gentleman, the Hollywood bon vivant, the London sophisticate, the cosmopolitan philosopher, the archivist and preservationist of village green and lea. For Warburton, who has enjoyed access to the famously private Fowles’s dairies and letters, the two worlds that matter are those of Fowles the living writer and Fowles the living person, and she does a fine job of capturing him in both guises. (For his part, Fowles has grumbled, “I know many writers fight fanatically to keep their published self separate from their private reality. . . . But I’ve always thought of that as something out of our social, time-serving side; not our true artistic ones.”) On the ordinary-life side, she explores Fowles’s childhood and early adulthood, marked by illness and checkered episodes in boarding school and the military, as well as the influence of his wife, Elizabeth, to whom he was married for 37 years and who appears, if obliquely, in many of his works. On the literary side, Warburton ably charts the course of Fowles’s evolution as a writer, one who seems not to have sought recognition until he had practiced a long and exacting apprenticeship; by the time his first book, The Collector, was published in 1963, she tells us, Fowles had written and shelved “nine or ten other novels.” Those who aspire to a soft life of literary fame will find Fowles’s example salutary, for no sooner had he become celebrated than did Fowles begin to reject the world of cocktail parties and seminars—though not the money that came with the job, and especially not the money that came from Hollywood, which won him the “rather spectacular Georgian house” on the English Channel that served as the focal point for his later life and figured in many of his later books.
A hard-working life of a hard-working, justly honored writer, very well told.Pub Date: March 22, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03283-2
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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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