Thoroughly disenchanting: Powers' admirers would do better to reread his stories or novels.
His daughter’s selection of correspondence reveals the American Catholic writer as immature, irresponsible and hard to live with.
Not that his wife and children got much time with J.F. Powers (1917–1999), who preferred solitude or the company of male friends to family life. He told his wife before they married that he wasn’t the domestic type and she should not look for him to maintain a steady income. Powers always avoided Thanksgiving and Christmas with his wife’s relatives, choosing instead to spend the holidays with old schoolmates or other friends. Many of these were priests, and Powers drew heavily upon their careers and experiences for his first novel, the 1963 National Book Award–winning Morte d’Urban, the story of a priest banished to the backwoods. Catholic writing flourished in the mid-20th century, and Powers contributed to the many magazines of the religious left and right. Nonetheless, he was constantly low on money and often took short-term teaching jobs that enabled him to relocate and leave his loved ones behind. At the same time, he was obsessed with the artist's relationship to his house and fixated on finding just the right place to live. The family moved constantly, three times to Ireland, and Powers insisted on his own space in each building. Even with that, he rented separate quarters so he would have a private place to work and write letters. His correspondence constantly references his work but mostly to say conditions were just too difficult for him to create. This volume would be more interesting if it included letters from others, particularly his long-suffering wife, but perhaps these would have only made it more distasteful by further exposing a character who comes across as completely self-absorbed and selfish.
Thoroughly disenchanting: Powers' admirers would do better to reread his stories or novels.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-26806-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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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