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 book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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