All different kinds of people are going to be disappointed by these heavily heralded diaries—kept by England's most acerbic schoolboy, playboy, traveler, soldier, and novelist. Scandal-seekers, aroused by news of London brouhahas, will find: some disapproving prep-school comments on boy-boy liaisons (Waugh destroyed the presumably homosexual Oxford diary); in the partying Twenties, page after page of "little lesbian tarts and joyboys," unfamiliar footnoted names, flat decadence ("Olivia as usual behaved like a whore and was embraced on a bed by various people"), and an astonishing, tiresome amount of drinking; and, the one true poison plum, Randolph Churchill on a mission to enemy-occupied Yugoslavia—coughing, farting, always drunk, apparently deserving of Waugh's nowfamous line (after 1964 surgery): "it was a typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it." So much for scandal. Students of the English literary scene won't do much better, since Wangh rarely discusses the books he read and reviewed, and his meetings with the Famous resulted in only the briefest notation: Noel Coward—"no brains"; the Sitwells—"Sachie liked talking about sex. Osbert very shy. Edith wholly ignorant." And admirers of the novels will certainly find Waugh's raw, raw materials here (a Welsh prep school, the Bright Young People, arduous travels in Africa and South America, WW II sorties), but hardly any references to the writer's craft appear. As for the man himself—the conversion to Catholicism happens between diaries as do the shattering breakup of his first marriage and his nervous collapse. Only in the last "boiled eggs and narcotics" years, along with scorn for his children, increasing boredom, and fears for society ("How long will Liberty, Diversity, Privacy survive anywhere?"), does the super-critical voice explore inward. Anti-Semitic, racist, labeling those unfortunate enough to cross his path as "odious," "hideous," and "stupid," Waugh put his worst self and much dull detail into these remarkably shallow, though terribly stylish, jottings. Scholars may want to go digging, but those who treasure Tony Last, Guy Crouchback, et al., are advised to steer clear.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1977
ISBN: 0753827387
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
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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