A mixture of pompous braying and insightful, quiet moments of magic.
Editor Benedict (The Practice of Deceit, 2005, etc.) presents a collection of 30 pieces by writers of varying ability, accomplishment and fame who recount “a moment when an authority figure saw talent in them, or when they came to believe they possessed it themselves.”
A couple of the weaker essays are by contributors who prate and prance (John Casey) or who make certain that we know that a mentor once called their writing wonderful (Julia Glass). Not all memories are in soft focus. Mary Gordon recalls an unkind cut from Elizabeth Hardwick that resulted in a 21-year estrangement. Edmund White writes wryly and eloquently about ambivalence, focusing on the prickly-pear personality of Harold Brodkey, who once raged that Updike had stolen his persona and plopped him into The Witches of Eastwick as the diabolical Daryl Van Horne. The most appealing pieces are reflective and self-deprecating. Michael Cunningham summons a moment from high school when an unusual adolescent girl told him he was stupid and that he should read Virginia Woolf ASAP. Alexander Chee, remembering Annie Dillard, notes that great teachers help you see the path you’re already on. Several writers confess to falling in love with other writers (mostly from afar). Cheryl Strayed wept when she finally heard Alice Munro at a reading. Samantha Hunt says she felt flayed by the words of Breece D’J Pancake. Joyce Carol Oates shines with her realization that she’s never had an actual mentor (her late husband, she reveals, rarely read her fiction); instead, she’s had colleagues she’s admired (John Gardner) and books she’s loved. Several contributors, Oates among them, write about formative books from childhood (are we surprised that she liked Poe?). Jane Smiley gets the last word in a sharp-edged piece about the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1970s, noting that “desire sparks imagination, imagination generates details, details take you from the beginning to the end.”
A mixture of pompous braying and insightful, quiet moments of magic.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-0861-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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
PERSPECTIVES
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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