The prolific Mellen (Creative Writing/Film, Temple Univ.) brings a literary talent as well as cinematic eye to the family saga of Kay Boyle (1902-92), an epic life reflecting the great literary and political events of the century. Behind the 30 volumes of fiction and poetry, besides essays, reviews, letters, and the short stories that Boyle brought to perfection in the New Yorker, was a restless, passionate, ambitious, desirable woman, as intense and prolific in her writings as in her loves and political beliefs—beliefs ranging from the anti-Semitism she shared with Ezra Pound in the 30's to the radicalism she shared with Joan Baez and Eldridge Cleaver in the 60's. Drawing on massive primary sources, family interviews, and the thousands of unpublished letters Boyle sold during her lifetime to earn money, Mellen tactfully presents her subject's public life as a successful author (``our little Dostoyevsky in ski pants,'' according to Kazin); her political life as an activist during McCarthyism and then Vietnam; and her private failure as a mother and wife. Incapable of introspection, Boyle retained her glamorous facade into old age, oblivious of her flaws, of the pain she caused those who loved her, or the significance of the causes she opposed (capital punishment, the Vietnam War, feminism) or the ones she sacrificed herself for: student rights, the Black Panthers, nuclear disarmament, migrant workers, Amnesty International. Jolas, Duchamps, Beckett, Djuna Barnes, Joyce, Lawrence are all here. And the scenes are incomparable: Paris in the 20's, Europe on the eve of WW II, America in the 50's, Haight-Ashbury in the 60's, and the campuses of the 70's, where this self-taught writer ended up teaching. Precise in detail, panoramic in scope, psychologically subtle, more than a literary biography, like Boyle herself, it is social and political history, a film waiting to be produced.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-18098-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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