Delightful prose and steady observations distinguish this thoughtful narrative of a complex life.
Green’s literary reputation may have lost some luster in the half-century since his last publication, but Treglown (English/Univ. of Warwick) restores its brightness in a lucid and captivating biography.
From 1926 to 1952, English industrialist Henry Yorke (1905–73) published (under his pseudonym) a collection of tersely titled social comedies (e.g., Blindness, Living, Party Going, Caught, Loving, Back, Concluding, Nothing, and Doting) whose pleasant façades masked some very dark undercurrents. Treglown dashes between Henry Green’s novels and Henry Yorke’s life, finding autobiographical illuminations in the world of fiction. Although such a practice is often mired in wild conjecture and improbable flights of fancy, a steady eye to historical fact provides a sturdy and trustworthy framework for the author’s analysis. The fine dividing line between pseudonymous author and aristocratic industrialist demands Treglown’s detailed attention to such matters as Yorke’s school years and married life so that he can ascertain the ways these experiences pop up in Green’s fiction. At the same time, the biographer judiciously yet generously allows his subject to speak directly in quotes that range from deploring the constraints of travel (“It interferes with my masturbation”) to hinting at indiscretions (“I’m taking your wife to a nightclub and I’ll bring her back probably in tatters in the morning”). The ambivalences and ambiguities voiced in these passages assist Treglown in delineating the many facets of a man often at odds with the life he lived, as when he somberly confesses, “Am very depressed, lonely & overworked.” Terry Southern once said that there are writers and writers’ writers, but that Green was a writers’ writers’ writer. Muddling through that obfuscatory compliment may be a challenge, but Treglown gives ample evidence of its accuracy.
Delightful prose and steady observations distinguish this thoughtful narrative of a complex life.Pub Date: March 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-43303-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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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