For potential and actual MacDonald fans, a worthwhile read. It will interest many others, too, who can learn about a...
The life, career, and era of mystery writer MacDonald have been painstakingly researched and presented by journalist Merrill (ESKY: The Early Years at Esquire, 1995).
Generous helpings from MacDonald's many letters enliven the narrative and help to offer an up-close look at this prolific author's personal and professional life. A graduate of the Harvard Business School, MacDonald approached writing with an eye toward daily productivity and an aversion for genres that were not selling. His output (at his death in 1986, he had published 70 novels, more than 500 short stories, and 4 books of nonfiction) is a testament to that no-nonsense approach. Merrill notes the unique characteristics of MacDonald's style—among them, the transplanting of the plot of the hard-boiled detective story from the dark streets of the mean city into the bright light of suburbia. Women characters met with more respect from MacDonald than they did from the pens of other favorites like Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming. Perhaps most outstanding, MacDonald's main characters held strong moral convictions: Travis McGee, hero of the well-known 21-book series, worried about racism, corporate greed, and ecology. The details of MacDonald's career serve as a study of a transformational era in publishing. When he started, there were hundreds of pulp magazines. He wrote for them, paid by the word. During WWII, he saw the pulps' huge numbers dwindle. Right in time, though, his career was significantly aided by the advent of the paperback book. He also experienced firsthand (and none too happily) the writing of screenplays and the adaptation of several of his books into films or television productions.
For potential and actual MacDonald fans, a worthwhile read. It will interest many others, too, who can learn about a revolutionary period in publishing through the eventful career of John D. MacDonald.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-20905-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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
PERSPECTIVES
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