The first volume of the first full biography of the preeminent Great War poet, sympathetic and thoroughly researched. Wilson (Virginia Woolf, Life, and London, 1988, etc.) delivers an exhaustively factual tome to offset Pat Barker’s fictional account of Sassoon in her Regeneration trilogy. In the years before the war, which he spent riding to hounds in Kent and writing dilettantish verse in London, Sassoon proves to have been as conventionally Edwardian as he could be, at least with his Sephardic Jewish-Tory family (“Cheshire Cheese farmer and Oriental aristocrats,” in his words) and his pre-Raphaelite ideas of poetry. Among fellow war poets, such as his friends Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen, Sassoon was unique in enlisting immediately and remaining in uniform until the Armistice. Although his near-suicidal bravery won him the Military Cross and the nickname “Mad Jack,” his realistic, corrosively ironic poetry shattered ideals of wartime heroism. Despite his protests in poetry, only in June of 1917 did he actually defy military authority. If Sassoon compromised his stand by returning to service after being treated for shell-shock, Wilson carefully balances her account of his conflicted loyalty to his fellow soldiers (and his deeper problems with his homosexuality) and his idealistic war protest. Her detailed chronicle includes not only vivid excerpts from both diaries and poetry—including some rare and unpublished verse—but also thorough, if slightly over-zealous literary criticsim. While another full-length biography of Sassoon has already been published in England since Wilson’s, and Sassoon’s estate has authorized yet another, this first installment of hers combines diligent literary spadework with a compassionate view of Sassoon’s contradictions as he fought a war on inward and outward fronts. Wilson’s biography makes a determined bid at being not only Sassoon’s first, but also, in its detail, his definitive one. (53 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 30, 1999
ISBN: 0-415-92325-5
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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