A lifetime selection of Hemingway's professional non-fiction as a reporter and columnist, this is a long-awaited book in the hardcover canon of the century's most imitated and most envied writer, and the man who built the tallest legend. His perfectionism seldom wavers in these pieces, though the later selections from Look magazine are in the garrulous Papa manner. The selections are in five categories. His four years (1920-1924) as a "Canadian" reporter for the Toronto Star find his famous tight style taking shape through Paris and the capitals. (For this period, Hemingway's work is better represented in Dell paperback— Hemingway: The Wild Years—which has forty-eight stories in addition to the twenty-five in By Line However, By-Line contains "Christmas on the Roof of the World" which the Dell book does not and which is the most moving, exciting story in either book.) The second period (1933-1939) contains his columns on fishing, bulls and the Spanish Civil War. While the style is still great, the Papa figure intrudes, not unpleasantly, and the stories are less tensely organized. The third period is high-powered reportage on the Civil War for North American News Alliance, and the fourth section finds "Ernie Hemorrhold, the poor man's Pyle" going into the Normandy beachhead on D-Day for Collier's. The last section is potpourri from the big slicks. By-Line contains dozens of incidents later novelized or used in short stories. Perhaps the century's greatest travel writer, his European catalogue of winds, breezes, trees, funiculars, rivers, lakes, wines and fiestas are nonpareil. As Lillian Ross might have put it, Hem feller have heap big magic.
Pub Date: May 29, 1967
ISBN: 0684839059
Page Count: 489
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1967
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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