A top journalist's engaging, worldly-wise account of a 35-year career in what, on the evidence of his wryly anecdotal text, comes off as the news game. All told, Corry spent 31 years with The New York Times (where, in the 1950's, he started as a copyboy in the sports department). Now a fellow at Columbia's Gannett Center for Media Studies, he forsook his otherwise lifelong employer in 1969 for Harper's, returning in 1971 to the Times after Willie Morris had been ousted as editor of that magazine. During his tenure at both publications, Corry formed strong and independent opinions on Manhattan's viscerally liberal literary establishment, as well as on its governance and cafe society. Never forgetting that the access he enjoyed almost anywhere in the world was more institutional than personal, the author covered a wealth of stories at home and abroad—stories ranging from Castro's Cuba through the suicide of Phillip Graham (then head of The Washington Post); political prisoners erroneously believed to be held by a Greek junta; Jackie O.; and Jerzy Kosinski (whose vilification by The Village Voice Corry rebutted in a lengthy Times article). Moreover, as a longtime proprietor of the Times's ``About New York'' column, the author offered readers perceptive takes on the city's haut monde and lesser lights. But he didn't write (as he does here with rueful wit) of his crumbling marriage, financial woes, love affairs, and problems with alcohol. Nor did he pass the sort of public judgment he passes here on famed colleagues and contemporaries—David Halberstam, John Lindsay, Norman Mailer, William Paley, Harrison Salisbury (who ``never met a revolution he didn't like''), William Styron, et al.—though, during a stint as the paper's TV critic, he had a lot to say about the media's handling of news. An absorbing memoir of a journalist's life during the best and worst of times.
Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13886-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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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