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AT HOME WITH THE MARQUIS DE SADE

A LIFE

Despite his manic promiscuities and a conspicuous gift for generating catastrophe, the Marquis de Sade was, according to Gray, a happily married man. In 1990 the monstrous Sade’s literary stock rose inestimably. Gallimard, the famous French publishing house, issued a two-volume set of his works in its prestigious series of classics, Bibliothäque de la PlÇiade. Now a very fine biographer has turned her attentions to Donatien Alphonse Franáois, Marquis de Sade (1740—1814). Gray is a woman of already substantial reputation as a novelist and journalist who established her credentials as a biographer with her excellent study of Flaubert’s lover, Louise Colet (Rage and Fire, 1990). Of course, many scholars have worked assiduously at Sade’s biography over the years, and Gray doesn—t claim to offer fresh discoveries. However, she can claim to offer fresh insight. The angle of vision she develops in her version of his life is that of Sade’s relationship with his devoted and loving and interestingly ordinary wife, PÇlagie, and their family. For his part, Sade seems also to have been devoted to PÇlagie, in his own odd way. Often prosecuted and publicly vilified for his sexual excesses (which are not nearly so bad as those he depicts in his fiction, but which remain sufficiently disgusting), Sade could always count on the support of his PÇlagie. The people who knew “Donatien” well, his biographer suggests, “detected a secret gentleness in him, something like a hidden stream of sweetness flowing through the heart of his being, which may well have been the secret of his terrible charm.” PÇlagie’s energetic husband will not win many admirers, but his life makes quite a story. Gray’s sharp and vivid prose, together with her skills as a storyteller, give this biography its edge over the scholars whose works have preceded it.

Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1998

ISBN: 0-684-80007-1

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998

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INTO THE WILD

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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