Intellectually stimulating but self-aggrandizing—a portrait of the artist in portraits of other artists.
An experimental memoir told in a series of biographical sketches of the author’s friends and colleagues.
In his latest book, Meyers (Robert Lowell in Love, 2016, etc.) attempts to revive appreciation for 14 underrecognized writers, artists, and scholars. Composed of short profiles on authors like Phillip Knightley and Paul Theroux, the book provides an insider’s view of their personal and professional lives. Drawn from “learned gatherings” and the author’s lengthy correspondence with his subjects, the narrative consists of intriguing, brief portraits, rendering each into “a colorful legend among the colorless academic drudges” (about critic Donald Greene). In the first section, Meyers focuses on his personal acquaintances, and the second features essays on five inspirational men he wishes he could have met—e.g., scholar and Russian spy Anthony Blunt. Meyers appears prominently throughout his book; while the texts are meant to honor these artists and exalt their histories and bibliographies, they transform into recurring reflections of Meyers and what his subjects think of him. It’s a brilliant way for a biographer to finally write about himself, although the author frequently revels in his own praise. The all-male focus feels old-fashioned, as does the author’s “interest in masculine writers” and love of gossip (many profiles recount affairs and other sordid morsels). Meyers is frequently “eager to win his [subject’s] respect,” and he seeks relationships based on a mutual intellectual appreciation. He mentions his search for an “ideal father figure” throughout the book, but he rarely moves past his own reflection. On Hugh Gordon Porteus, Meyers explains Porteus “was delighted to be rediscovered by me.” Later, the author recounts his “treasured” friendship with James Salter through dinner-party anecdotes and snippets of their storied intellectual discourse. He circles around self-affirming details like how “Jim inscribed twenty-six various editions of his books for [him]” and even shares “the three best” dedications (inscribed in Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime: “To Jeffrey. Represents, I think, the apogee”).
Intellectually stimulating but self-aggrandizing—a portrait of the artist in portraits of other artists.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8139-4168-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of Virginia
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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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