A boon for general readers as well as literary scholars.
Carefully annotated trove of correspondence between Jazz Age icons.
Scott Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre in the closing months of WWI, when he was stationed near Montgomery, Alabama. Mutually infatuated, the two soon married. Scott set out on an ambitious campaign to become “one of the greatest writers who ever lived”; not content merely to be a muse, Zelda studied to become a ballerina. All the while they traveled, cavorted, drank, made headlines, and wrote back and forth to each other. This fine collection of letters charts the course of their marriage, from storybook romance to eventual estrangement, the result of Scott’s alcoholism and Zelda’s descent into mental illness. Bryer and Barks (both Literature/Univ. of Maryland) provide useful headnotes and footnotes to the correspondence, which rivals the love letters of Abelard and Heloise in thoughtful billing and cooing while enumerating a range of betrayals and dissatisfactions. The editors suggest that the Fitzgeralds’ marriage was doomed from the outset, given their respective illnesses, but they conclude, taking issue with some biographers, “It is no more reasonable to say that Scott drove his wife mad than it is to say that Zelda drove her husband to drink.” Both spouses emerge from these letters as hardworking, intelligent, damaged people; readers may be surprised by the readiness of Zelda’s wit, even during her years of confinement in mental institutions. (Asking Scott to send books in 1931, for instance, she specifies “not [D. H.] Lawrence and not Virginia Woolf or anybody who writes by dipping the broken threads of their heads into the ink of literary history.”) Some of the letters have been published before; others have been paraphrased or briefly quoted in literary studies and biographies such as Nancy Milford’s now-standard Zelda (1970). To have them all so well presented in one volume is useful indeed.
A boon for general readers as well as literary scholars.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26875-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
