The Paris-based author of Giacometti: A Biography (1985) follows his recent remembrance of Picasso's model, Dora and Picasso, with sharply detailed profiles of six other interesting figures. He begins with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, explaining the ambition behind their relationship and the power of the tyrannical author's personality, while showing her close up, running errands and walking the dog. Lord convincingly makes the startling claim that the subject of Picasso's great portrait now at the Metropolitan Museum ``had a certain basic indifference to the visual arts.'' ``It was her private, subjective experience alone that determined the character of her objective convictions,'' he writes. ``Despite the unerring discrimination of her taste as a young woman, she may always have been more interested in painters than she was in painting.'' Three of Lord's other subjects he also met in post-war Europe, their lives marked by the political and cultural upheaval: The French actress Arletty, the star of Children of Paradise, whose liaison with a German officer cut off her career; Marie-Laure de Noailles, who wielded her fortune to collect art and patronize the surrealists; Errieta Perdikidi, a Greek woman who braved the Nazi occupation and civil war with singular grace. The author's most moving portrait is of his mother, Louise Bennett Lord, who wrestles with her conscience and the conventions of an upper-class American upbringing to decide whether to subsidize her son's writing or force him to earn a living. This struggle is mapped out in a series of wonderful letters from mother to son whose clear measured prose reveals her bedrock kindness, tolerance, and honesty. ``I am willing to finance this artistic enterprise within reason,'' she wrote, ``but I fear that I shall have to be the judge as to what reason is.'' In his penetrating commentary on his relationships with these six women, Lord reveals much about himself and examines the nature of friendship, loyalty, patronage, creativity, and moral courage. The book has the effect of a small exhibition of candid, finely rendered portrait sketches. Drawn in prose at once formal and immediate, the encounters are not quickly forgotten. (Photographs, not seen.)
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-26553-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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