Heartfelt but patchy. For more penetrating insights, see Olivier Todd’s Albert Camus: A Life (1997).
A whimsical sojourn into the life of Nobel-winning French “writer of conscience.”
Former New Yorker staff writer Hawes (New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City, 1869-1930, 1993) claims that she feels “a cosmic connection” to Albert Camus (1913–60). The author mostly forgoes literary analysis, focusing instead on what his daily life was like, and how the challenges he faced informed the literature he produced. Passing cursorily over Camus’s years in Algeria, primarily for lack of source material, the early chapters are choppy. Extensive quotations from his personal journal are juxtaposed with musings and descriptions of Hawes’s trips to France to find “the essence of the French identity.” The author then breezily discusses Camus’s meteoric rise to fame in Paris as editor of Combat, and the publication of his most enduring book, The Stranger (1942). Though Hawes claims that Camus’s editorials were “the talk of the town,” she doesn’t tell us why. Instead she attempts to capture the atmosphere of postwar France by staying at the Hotel Lutetia and ordering “a dozen oysters and a glass of Sancerre.” The narrative picks up when Hawes examines the impact of TB on Camus’s life. Providing graphic insights into how the disease both debilitated and motivated him from its onset in his teenage years, Hawes correctly notes how it magnified his sense of exile, of being the outsider. Camus saw himself as having a “high moral purpose,” and when he published his nonfiction book The Rebel in 1951, criticizing the tyrannical aspects of revolutions, he invoked the ire of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Parisian pro-Soviet, communist intelligentsia. Hawes provides delicious detail about Sartre’s public attack on Camus’s character and work, a painful betrayal by his former friend. After a period of shock and writer’s block, Camus’s rejection motivated him to write The Fall (1956), which earned him a Nobel Prize before his death in a car crash in 1960.
Heartfelt but patchy. For more penetrating insights, see Olivier Todd’s Albert Camus: A Life (1997).Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1889-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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