A convincing and affecting corrective: an act of admiration, and love. (49 b&w illustrations)
A fond remembrance of an alluring young editor who married the dying author of Animal Farm and steadfastly administered his literary affairs thereafter, earning the enmity of some Orwell partisans.
Spurling (La Grand Thérèse, 2000, etc.) met Sonia Brownell (1918–80) in 1970 and was quickly taken with the mercurial, intelligent woman whose vagaries occasionally mystified even her friends and supporters. In her preface, Spurling declares her purpose: to restore Sonia’s reputation, to fracture “the myth of the cold and grasping Widow Orwell,” and to humanize someone the author believes has been unfairly maligned. Sonia was born to English parents in India. But her father died (a possible suicide) when she was only four months old, and so the mother returned to England and employed whatever means she could to protect and raise her two daughters. Sonia was bright—especially adept at languages—and went to Switzerland to study French in 1935. A horrible boating accident on Lake Geneva killed a friend; this episode, says Spurling, permanently affected Sonia. The author periodically composes paeans to Sonia’s beauty (sometimes excessively so), but there is no doubt that she magnetized men. (She apparently attracted an entire London school of artists near her flat.) Involved for years with Horizon magazine, Sonia was by most accounts a spectacular employee: assiduous, charming, creative, informed. (Some male writers, however, lost their fondness for her when they received her crisp, professional rejection notices.) Spurling reveals that Sonia is the model for the luscious Julia in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the novel he finished shortly before he died of TB in 1950. Indeed, the dying novelist trusted Sonia so profoundly that he made her his sole heir. She protected his legacy sternly and co-edited the well-received four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (1968). She married badly another time but was the trusted friend of Ivy Compton-Burnett, Jean Rhys, Mary McCarthy, and many other luminaries.
A convincing and affecting corrective: an act of admiration, and love. (49 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58243-243-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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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