By no means the final word on O’Hara, but an appealing piece of special pleading. (8 pp. b&w photos)
An idiosyncratic biography of the pugnacious author (1905–70) of, most notably, Butterfield 8.
Himself a novelist (The Age of Consent, 1995, etc.), Wolff is as present as his subject here, frequently using the pronoun “I” and offering openly personal reactions to John O’Hara’s work and behavior. This direct engagement is often quite charming and funny: reporting the writer’s self-aggrandizing claim to have received “the highest ever” grade at one of the several prep schools he was thrown out of, Wolff characterizes the claim as “an absolute that this biographer, who confesses to a lazy failure to chase and pin down facts of this nature, absolutely disbelieves.” Indeed, Wolff’s sporadic interest in mundane things like dates makes this text unlikely to supersede the more conventional biographies of O’Hara by Finis Farr and Frank MacShane. This biographer follows his muse, devoting much more attention to O’Hara’s youth in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and the wild, alcoholic years in Prohibition-era Manhattan than to his happy second marriage or to his last two decades (covered in a single 34-page chapter). But it’s interesting and valuable to get another working writer’s sympathetic perspective—complete with blunt side-taking against condescending editors like the New Yorker’s Katharine White—on the psychic and financial difficulties of the author’s life. While sharing most critics’ view that O’Hara’s short stories and his first novel, Appointment in Samarra, were his best work, Wolff does not cavalierly dismiss even such baggy later efforts as A Rage to Live and Ten North Frederick; he’s too familiar with the struggle that goes into even mediocre books. Wolff is frank but generous about the insecurities that made O’Hara a social-climbing snob and a nasty drunk. As censorious biographers too often forget, those same insecurities fueled fiction notable for its sharp awareness of how the class system operates in American life and the damage it inflicts.
By no means the final word on O’Hara, but an appealing piece of special pleading. (8 pp. b&w photos)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-679-42771-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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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