Findlay employs a vast family archive to bring this little-known writer to the fame he justly deserves, making readers want...
C.K. Scott Moncrieff (1889-1930) was a poet, war hero, spy and, above all, one of the world’s greatest translators. Journalist Findlay reveals his natural, effortless writing talent in this story of her great-great uncle.
Moncrieff held a low opinion of his poetry, but his ability to recognize great talent brought him into the brotherhood of the great World War I poets, including Robert Graves, Osbert Sitwell, Siegfried Sassoon and, especially, Wilfred Owen. Moncrieff encouraged Owen in his writing, but it was his unrequited love of Owen that was most important. He vowed to give up poetry because his talent couldn’t compare. So many of England’s young intellectuals wrote of the horrors of war and never returned. Not so, Moncrieff; his work gloried in the chivalry and honor of soldiering and chronicled not blood and death, but flowers, integrity, friendship and the countryside. Beauty was his escape. Crippled by friendly fire and suffering from both shell shock and trench fever, he began writing reviews, criticism and translations. In 1919, he began to translate Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. It took nine years and seven volumes and was hailed as a masterpiece in its own right. So successful were his Latin, French and Italian translations that he was lauded as one poet catching the emotion of another. In the early 1920s, Moncrieff proposed that the passport office act as a cover for spies, and it was he who reported Mussolini’s attempts at expansion. A spy’s double life came easily as he’d been hiding his homosexuality for years. The most fascinating thing about Moncrieff is that he knew very little French grammar, and his Italian translations began even before he spoke the language.
Findlay employs a vast family archive to bring this little-known writer to the fame he justly deserves, making readers want to turn back to Proust.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-11927-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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