Sealed for 25 years since his death in 1956, the diaries of the once popular critic and newspaperman only now have been edited from the original manuscript, which is three times longer than the selections brought together here by Mencken scholar Fecher. Though something of an event for Menckenites, the publication of these diaries reveals little that wasn't already known from the famous curmudgeon's voluminous publications. What is new here isn't very pleasant, and even Fecher—a devout Mencken defender—admits the uglier aspects of these less inhibited jottings. Mencken proves to be both a racist and an anti-Semite, as many have long suspected, though not quite as vehement in his prejudices as Fecher suggests in his informative introduction. Written during the Thirties and Forties, the diaries follow Mencken's decline in popularity—temporarily forestalled by the succes of his American Language series—and reflect none of the excitement of his heyday as a critic and editor. By the Thirties, Mencken no longer championed writers such as Dreiser, but in fact found him an "incurable lout," and Sinclair Lewis an alcoholic "psycopath." Despite cameos by a drunken Faulkner, a charming Fitzgerald, a dull T.S. Eliot, and a manic Ezra Pound, the literary celebs in these pages are mostly second-rate and in decline themselves. Mencken hobnobs with politicians, medical men from Johns Hopkins, and journalists, but spends most of his time recording what he ate and drank, as well as the aftereffects, for he was clearly a hypochondriac, recording every heart palpitation and gas bubble. Much of the diary follows the internal affairs of The Baltimore Sun, with which Mencken remained affiliated long after he ceased writing for it, and the publishing house of Alfred Knopf, on whose board Mencken sat. Throughout the war years, Mencken remains true to his isolationist and libertarian principles, reserving his greatest invective for that "mountebank" FDR. Hardly the American Samuel Johnson (as Fecher avers), Mencken isn't even equal to Edmund Wilson, whose own diaries contribute to literary history in a way Mencken's seldom do.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1989
ISBN: 039456877X
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1989
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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