A major biography, then, of a minor figure.
A well-considered life of the phenomenally successful but little esteemed English writer.
Pity poor W. Somerset Maugham, whose friends called him “Willie”: he complained that his manicured Riviera villa and yacht were poor places to write, “out of touch with the stream of life, with people, with happenings of import.” When he entered into that stream, he sometimes got himself into deep trouble, but also turned up material for stories that approached literature—Of Human Bondage, The Razor’s Edge. Having achieved success early on with books that critics dismissed as potboilers, Maugham found himself outside the best literary circles; he lived to be a ripe 92, but “he developed no coterie and was sustained by no reliable faction,” and was indeed most unpopular. Literary and film biographer Meyers (Inherited Risk, 2002, etc.) enumerates the reasons for Maugham’s poor standing: he had a “chilling character,” lived abroad to avoid paying British taxes, was openly homosexual, and “enjoyed writing and composed with great facility in an age when highly admired authors, like Joyce and Kafka, tortured themselves with creative agony.” The last reason seems a little unlikely; like Stephen King and the National Book Award, after all, Maugham got his honors and his moolah too, a million dollars for the play Rain and its subsequent adaptations alone. But it finds echoes in critical assessments of the time, which accused Maugham of emotional tone-deafness and general hackishness. Meyers turns in a respectful account of Maugham, delivering a few nicely turned surprises that touch on, for instance, Maugham’s service as a spy in the South Seas and early Bolshevik Russia. All that doesn’t make the writer any more likable (as Meyers quotes C.P. Snow as observing, visiting Maugham was “rather like visiting one’s family lawyer”), but such moments at least make him seem more interesting.
A major biography, then, of a minor figure.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41475-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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
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
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