This easygoing, academically voiced bio of F. Scott Fitzgerald calls itself the first ``full-scale contemporary'' life since Turnbull's in 1962. Approvingly quoting Jay McInerney, Meyers dismisses lives by Bruccoli (``hagiographic''), Mellow (``peevish, sordid''), and Donaldson (``folksy psychoanalysis''), as well as Nancy Mitford's Zelda (``feminist revisionist''). Meyers, who has written biographies of Lawrence (1990), Conrad (1991), and Poe (1992), calls his own foray into Fitzgerald ``analytic and interpretive'' and claims to be hunting for psychological patterns in the writer's life (1896-1940). In addition to examining Fitzgerald's professional and personal relationships with literary and Hollywood figures like Donald Ogden Stewart, Edmund Wilson, Hemingway, and Irving Thalberg, Meyers peers into the private, personal lives of Scott and Zelda, zealously following the former's drinking career and the latter's encounters with various hospitals and doctors. Among the oddities he spies are Fitzgerald's bizarre foot phobia (he said that his naked feet filled him with ``embarrassment and horror''). Meyers does indulge in some obvious, dime-store psychoanalysis, asserting that the deaths of Fitzgerald's two older sisters, aged one and three, while his mother was pregnant with him, and of a younger sibling who lived for only one hour, not only doomed Fitzgerald to an overprotected and delicate childhood but also saddled him with survivor's guilt. Meyers asserts that Scott encouraged Zelda's escapades as subject matter for his writing, that much of their outrageous behavior was meant to keep themselves in the public eye and to sell books. He goes more deeply here into the Hemingway/Fitzgerald friendship than in his Hemingway (1985) and thinks the famous penis-measuring episode in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast highly suspect. Factually rich, if uninspired. (Book-of-the-Month Club alternate)
Pub Date: April 27, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-019036-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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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