Less thorough than James Campbell’s Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (1991), but still of much interest to...
A slender but sturdy life of the centrifugal author at home in New York.
Baldwin was many things; consistent is not necessarily one of them. Boyd (Pound for Pound: A Biography of Sugar Ray Robinson, 2005) notes that Baldwin was “committed to black radicalism” and a fellow traveler of Malcolm X, yet not so committed to the cause as to endorse younger activists such as Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who returned the favor. We meet Cleaver as he and Baldwin were supposedly kissing at a 1967 dinner party in San Francisco, “a graphic contradiction of [Cleaver’s] merciless attack on Baldwin’s homosexuality, or an indication of his own deep-seated sexual ambivalence.” Baldwin advocated racial rapprochement, telling Harlem schoolchildren, “Color doesn’t matter. Color is a political reality which certain politicians use. There is no moral value to black or white skin.” Yet he excused his vigorous anti-Semitism by saying that nearly all blacks in Harlem, after all, hated Jews: “We hated them because they were terrible landlords, and did not take care of the building.” Baldwin, writes Boyd, was a student of Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen and was active in the small literary circle that succeeded the movement. Yet where Cullen was concerned with community-building, Baldwin seems to have thrived on feuds, such as a long-running one with Langston Hughes and, calculated to fuel anti-Semitic sentiments, another fierce one with Norman Mailer. Boyd traces those conflicts to their roots, delivering a refined sort of literary gossip ennobled by substance: We hear, for instance, of Henry Louis Gates’s running argument with Baldwin over whether Harriet Beecher Stowe was a worthy writer, of Amiri Baraka’s dismissal of Baldwin for not being a sufficient revolutionary and so forth.
Less thorough than James Campbell’s Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (1991), but still of much interest to students of recent American letters.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9307-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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