Far too arcane and cumbersome to enthrall most fans of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, but deserves a place on the...
In the “heroic-capitalist” novelist’s centenary year, prosecuting attorney Valliant skillfully cross-examines two previous biographers’ accounts of her tumultuous love affair with a younger man.
The affair itself is notorious: In the middle 1950s, having first obtained the blessing of their respective spouses, brilliant, bestselling Rand, then 50, began a sexual relationship with her 25-year-old protégé, Nathaniel Branden, who became her public spokesman. Fourteen years later, the affair blew up after Rand learned of a longstanding extra-extramarital liaison between Branden and one of his female students. He later became a psychologist and author of popular books on self-esteem, but he still had a score to settle with Rand. His memoir-cum-biography, My Years with Ayn Rand (1989), portrayed her as an especially ruthless, hysterical version of the woman scorned, and former wife Barbara Branden did much the same in The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986). Valliant disputes this view, bringing to bear a persuasively close reading of internal contradictions and implausibilities in the Brandens’ books and subsequent statements. The author also makes use of previously unpublished personal journals kept by Rand in 1967 and ’68, when her vast Objectivist following split into camps and drifted away over the rupture between the philosopher-queen and her “intellectual heir.” Valliant appears to be a member of the still-very-active pro-Rand camp, but if the excerpts and editing of these journals can be trusted, they show the Brandens in a harsher light and offer a new glimpse of Rand as a remarkably patient, even “objective” expositor of facts that must have pained her.
Far too arcane and cumbersome to enthrall most fans of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, but deserves a place on the lengthening shelf of books about the influential Rand’s accomplishments and character.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-930-754-67-1
Page Count: 433
Publisher: Durban House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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