Personal reminiscence, literary analysis, biography, and historical overview: this volume throws every critical tool possible at its protagonists—the Beat triumvirate of William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac—only to produce a mishmash of sycophantic praise and endless personal anecdote. The opening vignette of Paradise Outlaws combines a polemic against the tenets of New Criticism with a eulogy to a king setter named Shantih, and such a bizarre conflation of ideas sets the tone for a book undermined at every turn by its lack of focus. Tytell’s exuberance offers only obvious insights into his subjects’ otherwise fascinating lives, including such banalities as how the Beats rejected the values of America’s Puritan heritage and felt stifled by the rampant conformity of the 1950s. The real hero of Paradise Outlaws seems to be Tytell himself: he desperately wants his readers to know that he was personally acquainted with these writers. Unfortunately, Tytell appears to be merely the Kato Kaelin of the Beat circle, always there at the right moment to be caught in a photograph. Nevertheless, the authorial presence thus destroys the objectivity needed to explore the work of his beloved friends. The main personal photographs of the Beats and their circle, taken by Tytell’s wife, Mellon, contribute the book’s only remarkable feature. Raw with candor and spontaneity, the pictures capture the men and their world in moments of sparkling clarity; such photos as one of Burroughs standing in his nattiest attire before a noose and Ginsberg sitting in his Cherry Valley, N.Y., kitchen capture their subjects in rare and personal moments. With so many wonderful photographs of the Beats and the people who shared their countercultural world, Paradise Outlaws could have been a great coffee-table book, if only it had been envisioned as such.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-16443-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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
PERSPECTIVES
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