Once called ``the Dirty Harry of contemporary literary theory,'' Lentricchia (Duke) proves something of a postmodern wimp in this annoying, enervating memoir of his life as a critic (successful) and family man (failure). Clearly, the current sort of criticism practiced in the academy is no preparation for writing to a wider audience, as Lentricchia attempts here. And he makes the transition as bumpy as possible—indulging in stream-of-conscious blather, confusing fragmentary bits, and callow political invective. At his worst (or maybe his best), Lentricchia sounds like a Don DeLillo character, full of abstract musings on the age, but he doesn't seem to grasp DeLillo's ironies. In fact, Lentricchia takes himself very seriously. Part of his memoir records his stays in a South Carolina monastery, where he reaffirms his belief (in art, not God) and broods on his shortcomings as a husband and father. Proud of his Italian-American heritage, Lentricchia sees his life as a balance of the aesthetic and ascetic impulses. His career as a critic derives from his early love of language but, at the same time, he grooves on ``mafia talk'' and the extremism he finds crucial to his ``ethnic'' life. There's lots of highly personal literary criticism here—the sections on T.S. Eliot are fine, though Lentricchia's slangy stuff on Kafka seems like more posing in a book full of such antics. A few trips to Ireland occasion thoughts on Yeats and Joyce but also callow asides on the ``Troubles.'' The most expendable parts here are the running commentaries on the book's composition, and by the time Lentricchia declares his ``desire not to have a self to reflect upon,'' you wish he would follow his instinct. Instead, he retreats into his many ``selves,'' a tactic in keeping with his trendy theoretical notions. For all its goofy self-absorption, Lentricchia's guilt-ridden lament stumbles onto some topics worthy of further discussion. Next time, think clarity and focus.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43072-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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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