An emotionally astute study that belies its length.
A brief introduction to the pioneering, cantankerous and oft-frustrated author.
This book, part of the publisher's series of short biographies of prominent African-Americans, isn't intended to deliver new information or surprising insights into the life and work of Richard Wright (1908–60). But given that the two major biographies of Wright surpass 600 pages, Wallach (African-American History/Univ. of North Texas) fills a gap, and it's no rush job. Though she speeds through the major touchstones of her subject's life, she takes time to make considered observations about the author's psyche. Wright's motivations were simple during his childhood. As a teenager his chief interest was escaping the grinding poverty of rural Mississippi, and his growing frustration with Southern racism pushed him to Memphis and later Chicago. Inspired by the ferocity he discovered in the writings of H.L. Mencken, Wright began working on poetry, essays and fiction, gaining a supportive community among Communist Party members during the 1920s and ’30s. In Harlem he wrote Native Son, his career-making 1940 novel about the struggles of a young black man in Chicago—though he made compromises in its tone and plot to win the approval of the Book-of-the-Month Club (and the bestseller status that came with it). Tellingly, Wallach's biography is more than half finished by the time Native Son makes Wright an international success, and what follows shows the author as increasingly combative and rudderless. He publicly broke with the Communist Party, saw his marriage fail thanks to his infidelities and bypassed the Civil Rights Movement in the United States to settle in France and speak out on racial injustice globally. Wallach efficiently captures this complicated period of Wright's life, setting his public statements of outrage against his private refusals to let more than a handful of people into his personal life, alienating even intimate protégés like Ralph Ellison. By the time of his death, Wright had spent years struggling to synthesize his thinking into a work as potent as Native Son, and though Wallach gives reasons to admire his later career, she convincingly argues that more affecting works might've been produced by a more compassionate man.
An emotionally astute study that belies its length.Pub Date: June 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56663-824-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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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