A well-informed perspective on early-20th-century literature.
A sensitive biography of an influential editor and critic.
Like his American counterpart, famed Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins, Edward Garnett (1868-1937) nurtured a long roster of outstanding writers, including Joseph Conrad, Stephen Crane, D.H. Lawrence, Edward Thomas, E.M. Forster, John Galsworthy, and T.E. Lawrence. In her assured literary debut, Smith (Modern Literature/Univ. of East Anglia), director of her university’s master’s program in biography and creative nonfiction, draws on Garnett’s copious correspondence, critical writings, and memoirs of those who knew him to create a finely etched portrait of a man who exerted a quiet, decisive influence on arts and letters. From the age of 21 until his death, Garnett served as reader for several eminent publishing houses, beginning with T. Fisher Unwin, for whom he evaluated some 700 manuscripts a year, and including Heinemann, Duckworth, and Jonathan Cape, all literary publishers eager to identify new talent. “He has done more than any living writer to discover and encourage the genius of other writers,” Forster wrote, “and he has done it all without any desire for personal prestige.” Smith notes only a few instances of frustration, where he wished he had been successful for his own creative work. For the most part, though, he devoted himself to guiding other writers. He had the rare skill, she writes, “to ‘talk’ a book into being…adapting his approach to the temperament of the protégé, reassuring the timid, cajoling the reluctant and bellowing at the bloody-minded.” Smith examines Garnett’s personal as well as professional life: his devoted but unconventional marriage to Constance Garnett, an acclaimed translator of Russian literature; his siblings, friends, and lovers; the couple’s son, David, who forged a career of his own as writer and publisher. Garnett’s literary relationships could be intense: he saw Conrad as “a kindred spirit,” and he championed Crane’s “brilliant precocity.” “The born artist must be true to his own vision,” he once wrote, “the born critic to those of other men.”
A well-informed perspective on early-20th-century literature.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-28112-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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