Absorbing study of a surprising, multifaceted life.
Biography of a polarizing popularizer of general semantics and one-term senator from California.
Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa (1906–1992), born in Vancouver of aristocratic Japanese parents who returned to Japan when he entered college, never learned Japanese and always thought of himself as North American. He studied and taught English literature in Canada and the United States and aspired to be a modernist poet like one of his heroes, T.S. Eliot. By the time he began teaching at the University of Wisconsin in 1936, he had affected the manners and speech of an Oxford don, a self-presentation that led others to give him the nickname of Don, which would stick. Hayakawa first made his mark as the author of a manual for students of writing that came to be called Language in Thought and Action, based on the idea of general semantics formulated by Alfred Korzybski, a supposedly scientific means of analyzing the meanings of words. Always restless in mind and ambitious in spirit, Hayakawa used the magazine he founded, ETC., to muse about favorite subjects like jazz, automobile design and civil rights. His early liberalism, which made him suspect in the McCarthy years, yielded to an eccentric conservatism in the ’60s, particularly in his iconic role as acting president at San Francisco State University. Haslam (English Emeritus/Sonoma State Univ.; Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California, 1999, etc.), a student and colleague of his subject’s, admits that while he thought much of the left’s criticism of Hayakawa was unfair, he and the senator drifted apart politically as well as professionally. Nevertheless, the book is a promise kept to Hayakawa’s wife. Haslam (with his own wife as partner) was a good choice for biographer. He clearly admired his subject but is fair (though discreet) about his flaws, including a reputation for philandering.
Absorbing study of a surprising, multifaceted life.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3764-3
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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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