Walker Percy was a lot of things: son of a suicide father and, soon after, motherless as well; a pathologist; a TB patient; a Catholic convert and the Church's most interesting orthodox thinker since Chesterton; a dogged nonacademic philosopher; a father of a deaf child; a determinedly middle-class husband and citizen. All these things along with being one of the best novelists America ever has had. That Tolson, editor of The Wilson Quarterly, should have been drawn to Percy's life is more than understandable—but that he seems to care so little about the art Percy put his life to is mystifying and somewhat of a letdown. True, Percy saw his remarkable novels as tools of knowledge; beneath them lay a rare didactic and spiritual urgency. But when Tolson must frame Percy's later writing life around these works, he does so without the tools of literary nuance, treating them rather as more-or-less stymied vehicles for themes and ideas and beliefs the books always fall short of snugly abstracting. Percy—a contradictory man—admittedly put as much as half of his energies into promoting a philosophical-religious program of ideas. Still, it is for his rangy, suave, amused, beautiful prose, and for the startling Russian-like admixture of terror and laughter that makes up his works, that he will be remembered. This comes across in Tolson's workmanlike book only as through a glass darkly. Tolson, though, does give us more specifics of Percy's life than we've ever had: the ambivalences of his growing up as the ward of his cousin Will, author of Lanterns on the Levee; his exhilarating lifelong friendship with Shelby Foote (the letters between them excerpted here are worth the price of the book); his longing for community and his great aloneness. But to leave out, as Tolson largely does, careful inspection of the crosspiece to Percy's pilgrimage of belief—the lies he put his life to making, the fiction—makes this much less than the book it could have been.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-65707-0
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992
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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