A soberly investigated picaresque life of the barfly author of Notes of a Dirty Old Man. For those critics who felt that Bukowski buddy Neeli Cherkovski’s colorful but less than rigorous Hank: The Life of Charles Bukowski (1991) lacked objective distance, London journalist Sounes has enough to offset his hero-worship of the womanizing, dipsomaniacal, down-and-out poet-novelist. Bukowski is probably best known from his self-portrait of an alcoholic in the movie Barfly, but his almost lifelong problems with alcohol, money, women, an abusive father, and a menial job at the post office never slowed a prolific output of poems, short stories, and novels. With such a disreputably mythic author, whose works are both transparently autobiographical and scabrously candid, this book’s task is not to dig up dirt on the subject, but to find out which dirt is the real dirt. Sounes, whose previous book, the true crime Fred & Rose (not reviewed), detailed a respectable married couple’s mass killings, steadies stories of Bukowski’s outrageous antics (getting beer cans thrown at him during a boozy poetry reading, for instance) with the dogged journalistic work of tracing paper trails, from public records to Bukowski’s correspondence and unpublished writing, and interviewing his surviving family, friends, colleagues, and ex-girlfriends. Some (self-perpetuated) myths are brought down quickly, such as Bukowski’s illegtimacy. Other revelations give more substance to the Bukowski legend, such as how careful he was in fact with his money even when playing the horses, how dedicated he was to his writing even when he couldn’t hold down a steady job during the “barfly” years, and how close he really was to being fired when he finally quit the post office to write full-time. Despite its often fannish tone, a biography that listens to Bukowski’s all-night barroom anecdotes and then checks the facts the morning after. (b&w photos and illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8021-1645-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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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