Goodheart writes with disarming gentleness throughout, but his memoir is a forlorn reminder that the Great Books do not...
A literary critic reflects on his career in the elite circles of the academy, his tenuous connection to Jewish identity, and the vicissitudes of age.
Although Goodheart (Humanities/Brandeis) has little that is strikingly unique to say about his childhood (in a politically progressive family during the 1930s and ’40s) or his initiation into the intellectual scene of the 1950s, his account treats the usual themes—the gradual erosion of his identification with Judaism, as well as the drama of the “golden age” of Columbia University—with humor and some sensitivity. His memoir is most successful, in fact, as an account of a vanished academic world, in which bright young men could step almost effortlessly into more or less prestigious sinecures, and students, campus staff, and wives seemed to exist only to serve the scholars in their pursuit of their calling. He depicts the imperiousness of the prominent Formalist critics and the ironies of his own “conversion” from his family’s socialist idealism to the decidedly apolitical critical approaches then in vogue with some sensitivity. At the same time, casual references to relocating his (unnamed) wife as he climbed the career ladder from job to job are disconcerting, hinting at but never exploring the human cost of the professorial privilege that he enjoyed. A similar mix of self-consciousness and evasion pervades his discussion of a critic’s political obligations. “My mind swung between the poles of ‘on the one hand’ and ‘on the other,’ ” Goodheart confides, but the effect is less existential doubt than waffling. The philosophical ruminations that follow, pondering “the perils of no convictions” have the texture of a magazine article stretched to chapter length, offering broad generalizations about “people on the left,” conservatives, and postmodernists—but little analysis of specific positions or arguments. The last two chapters mourn the indignities of his own late middle age and his mother’s old age: physical deterioration, alienation, and loneliness.
Goodheart writes with disarming gentleness throughout, but his memoir is a forlorn reminder that the Great Books do not necessarily provide moral compasses or solace for the human condition.Pub Date: May 29, 2001
ISBN: 1-58567-146-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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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