Pure pleasure.
In the third installment of his autobiography, the ex-barrister Mortimer (The Sound of Trumpets, 1999, etc.) focuses on a year spent as a scriptwriter for hire, fundraiser for the Royal Court Theater, advocate for penal reform, and crippled, nearly blind old liberal staggering around Tony Blair’s new Britain.
In a more literate time—the 18th century, say, or the 1970s—this brief, witty memoir of an English man of letters suffering the beginning of what is shaping up to be a rather unpleasant old age might not seem quite so extraordinary. Today, however, it seems like a rare and possibly exceptional work. Mortimer begins with practical advice for his fellow screenwriters: “Writing film scripts is like sending soldiers over the top in the First World War. Very few of them come back alive.” From there it’s on to bigger and better things. There are numerous celebrity cameos. The elderly Italian director Franco Zeffirelli reflects pensively on his inability to distract himself with sex the night before a troublesome script meeting. The novelist Muriel Spark is charming and morbid. The baby-boom generation is represented by a pair of identical twins from Birmingham, now married to members of the rock group Deep Purple, who dabble in alternative medicine. Generation-X leftists appear and the author is a bit taken aback to discover they are less interested in such old-school progressive concerns as poverty and civil liberties than in protesting fox-hunting and explaining at length why leather seats are inherently sexist. Mortimer is no easier on himself, adamantly rejecting the idea that old age brings with it wisdom: “Some of the worst misdeeds, follies and crimes of mankind are committed by irresponsible old men. The experience of old age is that, in a body maimed and incapacitated by time, you feel much as you did when you were eleven.”
Pure pleasure.Pub Date: June 4, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89986-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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