A biography, which is also a composite picture, of the mainspring of the New Yorker, presents Harold Wallace Ross during his 27 year marriage to that magazine, as the author, and many others, knew and remembered him. From a series of pieces in the Atlantic Monthly this has turned into an "ordeal of love", in which the research, the recall with friends and fellow workers, and the whole backtracking of sidelights on Ross, his standards for his publication and his methods of running it, meshes into a many prismed view of the man, his time, his editorship, his writers and staff, and the growth of a provincial sheet into an internationally accepted American weekly. There are stories and stories, about the art conferences, the various departments and the parade of names that contributed — or failed to — the magazine's growing stature: Sayre, Johnston, Ingersoll, Sullivan, Cheever, Addams, Hokinson, Arno, Woollcott (and the non-stop mutual sniping between him and Ross), Gibbs, the Whites, O'Hara, Lardner, Mosher, Parker, Benchley, McNulty, Walker, Wilson, McKelway, and more and more. The $71,000 embezzlement by Ross' private secretary, Harold Winney; the legal crises and law suits; the intramural feuds, even with Raoul Fleischmann whose money kept the wheels turning from its earliest, unpromising days, down to the running of the whole office; and, above and beyond, the fighting, snarling, obdurate, ignorant, remarkable, worried, wondering, baying, troubled —and perfection seeking editor — the Ross, at his worst and at his best, whose warming touches kept loyalties (and the right enemies) to the lonely, failing end in 1951. An affirmation of a love for a man, as well as his profession, this accords full tribute, to one whom many will "never forget as long as I live", with mind as well as heart. Thurber's drawings will enhance this commemorative.
Pub Date: May 28, 1959
ISBN: 0060959711
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1959
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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