Pays fitting tribute to a man who was as admirable as he was gifted.
An excellent account of the British poet’s life, particularly strong on his personality, literary friendships, and political activism.
Sutherland (Modern English Literature/University College London) had the cooperation of Lady Spender, who provided access to her husband’s unpublished papers. But the biographer is as frank as his subject was. Spender wrote openly in World Within World and other nonfiction works about his homosexual relationships, his brief flirtation with the Communist Party, and other youthful adventures that a different sort of elder literary statesman would have glossed over. Stephen Spender (1909–95) believed like his lifelong friends W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Isaiah Berlin that honesty was a moral and an artistic imperative. Sutherland emulates this candor as he traces Spender’s trajectory from an unhappy childhood (chronically ill mother; gifted, overwrought, underachieving father) through the golden years of the 1930s, when he roamed restlessly across Europe (including disillusioning engagement in the Spanish Civil War) and achieved early fame with Poems, 1933, to his mid-20s discovery of heterosexuality and his happy second marriage to pianist Natasha Litvin in 1941. The postwar years get equally evenhanded treatment as Spender became a strong voice for anticommunist liberalism and, through his involvement in the magazine Encounter, an unwitting recipient of CIA funding through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (Spender resigned in 1967 when he learned the truth). Sutherland appreciates Spender’s poetry without spending much time analyzing its particular qualities; he’s content to quote from others and devote most of his pages to his subject’s manifold social and professional activities in England and America. The poet comes across as a warm and charming man, affectionate and loyal to his many friends without overlooking their faults, and deeply devoted to his family. It often inspires skepticism when a dying world figure states, “At the end of my life I feel that my wife and children have been the greatest happiness to me,” but with Spender you believe it.
Pays fitting tribute to a man who was as admirable as he was gifted.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-19-517816-5
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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