You’ll be forgiven for thinking that a place in national politics or pro hockey would be a more restful and attainable...
A coked-up Capote, a torn-apart Tartt, a bellowing Bellow: longtime Vanity Fair editor Carter assembles shimmering pieces on the literary life.
Founded in 1913, Vanity Fair, writes Carter, was “immediately a hothouse for literary talent.” Eleven decades later, it continues to draw some of the most prominent names in literature, who here offer a kind of informal genealogy of contemporary American letters, looking at shared influences and inspirations. For instance, when One Hundred Years of Solitude burst on the scene in the 1960s, Toni Morrison, then an acquisitions editor, had an early look and decided to jump ship and dedicate herself to writing. “I got permission from García Márquez,” she says by way of Paul Elie’s lively history of the book, to write Song of Solomon. Junot Díaz, Salman Rushdie, and John Irving also took their own cues from the Colombian writer’s pages. Less influential figures pop up in the anthology as well, including the now unjustly forgotten Ward Just, who arrived in Washington, D.C., and, by David Halberstam’s account, made the Atlantic Seaboard into “Just Country”: “he was struck,” writes Halberstam, “by the contrast between the Kennedy people, so coolly arrogant and eager to rule not just America but also the world, and the seemingly doddering Eisenhower people, most of them older businessmen, who could hardly wait to return to the bland comforts of the Midwest.” Like Just, some of the writers will seem like figures from ancient history at first, but their later contemporaries at Vanity Fair bring them back to life. Dorothy Parker, writes the late Christopher Hitchens, “did not forsake her habit of stretching like a feline and then whipping out with a murderous paw.” All, subjects and writers alike, are people whose company a literary-minded reader will seek, and all are richly present here.
You’ll be forgiven for thinking that a place in national politics or pro hockey would be a more restful and attainable aspiration, but this collection is essential to anyone thinking of taking up the writer’s trade.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-14-311176-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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