A tediously enthusiastic biography of a once celebrated man of letters. The career and subsequent eclipse of Rupert Hughes (18721956) is further proof that, in literature at least, it is extremely rare for one to be both prolific and great. Hughes had an enormous, even compulsive need to create—writing dozens of novels, short stories, biographies, patriotic screeds that no one reads anymore; scripting, even directing, scores of silent and talkie films that now go unwatched; composing music that is never listened to. He even cranked out the occasional unmuseumed sculpture. In his own time, he was enormously successful and the tag ``story by Rupert Hughes'' was once a significant draw for both films and magazines. Today, he is remembered, if at all, as an uncle of billionaire Howard Hughes. In his dull and thorough way, Kemm, a retired journalist and distant cousin of Hughes's, tries to make the case that posterity has been unfair to ``one of the most remarkable persons in the history of American literature and in the patriotic life of the nation.'' But the plot of every Hughes work he recounts seems worse than the last, and all the quotes and excerpts sound clumsy and wooden. Both Hughes and Kemm share an uncanny gift for using the next-best word. Kemm claims that Hughes led an interesting life, but apart from some mildly controversial opinionizing on subjects such as God, divorce, and George Washington, some late-life ratting out of film-industry communists, and a little home-front soldiery in both world wars, it was mainly scribble, scribble, scribble. History's verdicts are often unfair, but despite Kemm's best, belabored efforts to resurrect Cousin Rupert's reputation, he's arguing a losing case. (30 b&w photos)
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1997
ISBN: 0-938817-49-3
Page Count: 424
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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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