An unabashed reminiscence that never fully coheres.
A familiar coming-of-age memoir about a young New Yorker who dreams of literary success.
“What a great, noble thing,” Tuten (Self-Portraits: Fictions, 2010, etc.) declares, “to give your life to art.” In short, nostalgic vignettes dating back as early as 1944, the author, a winner of the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, recounts two decades of maturation and intellectual posturing throughout his formative years in New York. Before becoming a novelist, screenwriter, and art critic, Tuten was determined in his youth to become “part of the world that [he] had read about in novels.” After a brief foray into painting, he was drawn to literature and so began the life of an aspiring writer. Although he never made it to la vie boheme in Paris, he repeatedly attempted to emulate a European lifestyle at home. He smoked “unfiltered Gauloises, like the French intellectuals,” and his vision of “the artist’s life” is one of “books, music, art, and a beautiful woman.” As he recalls, “I dreamed of instant fame, a book contract, and the waitress at Figaro noticing me.” Tuten pairs this relatable naiveté with too many tales of girlfriends and sexual exploits, but this is appropriate from an author who once considered Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer to be “a manifesto for my liberty.” The author’s intellectual ambitions, while compelling and at times inspirational, are not particularly unique. The memoir’s perfunctory finish reveals the lack of any substantive arc and suggests Tuten could have wandered through more memories if he had felt so inclined. The author’s life was unquestionably exciting—he published acclaimed novels, taught with Paul Bowles in Tangiers, worked on films, and befriended Roy Lichtenstein—but these stories are relegated to the occasional endnote, if addressed at all. Perhaps they are being saved for a more exciting follow-up.
An unabashed reminiscence that never fully coheres.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9445-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
