Some 150 letters home by the young Faulkner, who is way up north in New York and New Haven, or in New Orleans or in France. These previously unpublished letters are distinguished by Faulkner's softly edged humor about strangers and their strange practices and by his mellifluous impressions of place. The lengthy introduction by Watson (English/Univ. of Tulsa) ties them in with Faulkner's early novels Soldier's Pay and Mosquitoes and shows them as generating background detail for Quentin Compson and other characters in his major works. Faulkner's voice is a pleasure to listen to, his southern tones filling every page, and he is not above making fun of himself: ``I saw one of the most attractive girls this afternoon. She sells cheap jewelry at Woolworth's. I bought a gaudy comb which I am sending Mammy, to talk to her...I really would like to have her where I could sit and look at her when ever I liked.'' During the seven years covered here, Faulkner gets a job at the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. in New Haven (``I am holding three jobs now. One of them keeps me chasing all over the plant. I am seriously considering that they furnish me with roller skates''); trains as a Royal Air Force pilot in Canada (although WW I ends before he gets overseas); is homesick constantly; writes poetry; and enrolls in the Univ. of Mississippi. He then clerks in a Doubleday bookstore in Manhattan as his letters grow quite witty and beautiful (``you pass through tight little New England villages built around plots of grass they call greens...there is a feeling of the most utter relief, as if I could close my eyes, knowing I have found again someone who loved me years and years ago''); spends six months on Soldier's Pay in New Orleans in the company of Sherwood Anderson; goes abroad; and corrects proofs of Soldier's Pay for Boni & Liveright. Sweet little basket of nuts and berries.
Pub Date: Jan. 27, 1992
ISBN: 0-393-03081-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1991
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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