Veteran writer Jerome (Stone Work, 1989; Staying with It, 1984, etc.), a former magazine columnist and editor, evokes in diary form a year in his writing life, measuring out the days in seasoned spoonfuls of insight and effort. ``At age fifty-seven I find myself still learning to work,'' writes Jerome. Despite eight books and hundreds of articles, he calls himself ``a competent but essentially invisible writer,'' a craftsman daily struggling to build spare, honest sentences. According to this ex-sportsman, writing such sentences is the best and most demanding sport there is—``a moral act'' that ``establishes a truth that somehow authenticates you''—but a writer must learn to fight through thickets of confusion and distraction to reach those beautiful glades of clarity and insight. Not the least of the thorny problems is money (or, rather, the lack of it), and here Jerome criticizes a publishing business that lavishes the bulk of its energy and cash on a relative few huge commercial properties while books by lesser-known writers like the author himself appear and disappear with barely a nod from the public or media. In these entries, Jerome anxiously awaits the reviews of Stone Work, only to watch it slip from the bookshelves by the end of the year. He consoles himself, and the reader, by noting the abundant small pleasures of his life (he walks his dogs every day at noon, drinking in the seasonal changes in his western Massachusetts landscape). And he also offers tips for other writers, including a useful schema for writing a nonfiction book that involves breaking a subject into manageable categories. A charming and worthy tour of one writer's life, practiced as he preaches.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-670-82885-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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