This meticulously crafted, well-paced biography should go a long way toward burnishing Styron's reputation. Unlike most modern novelists of acknowledged weight, Styron has also enjoyed enormous popular and commercial success. Many of his eight books, such as The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie's Choice, have become international bestsellers. However, though in some circles—notably France—he is considered a writer of the first rank, Anglo-American critics have been less kind to Styron, believing that anyone of his range, accessibility, and Çclat is, perhaps, not meant for the ages. Not that Styron has much heeded the opinions of critics. Rather, he conceives of writing as an existential compulsion. As he wrote in the inaugural edition of the Paris Review, ``The writer . . . must go on writing, reflecting disorder, defeat, despair, should that be all he sees at the moment, but ever searching for the elusive love, joy, and hope—qualities which, as in the act of life itself, are best when they have to be struggled for. . . .'' While, as West illustrates, Styron's life has included its share of turmoil—a difficult childhood in Virginia, the heated controversy that greeted publication of The Confessions of Nat Turner, and a devastating bout with depression—on the whole he has followed Flaubert's hopeful dictum: ``Be regular and orderly in your life, like a good bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.'' And unlike all too many writers, he has contrived to spend very little time struggling financially. Early fame and a good marriage provided world enough and time for his slow, painstaking writing process. His gift for friendship- -with James Baldwin, Peter Mathiessen, George Plimpton, to name just a few—also served him well. West (English/Pennsylvania State Univ.) deftly transforms the solitary, drudging life of a writer into an absolutely compelling narrative, welding astute criticism and assiduous research into an eloquent whole. A masterful achievement. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-41054-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
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
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