Another side of a significant 20th-century writer, preserved from the archives.
A humanizing interview with the late cultural icon, who was often perceived as a fiercely aggressive and polarizing intellect.
In 1978, Rolling Stone contributing editor Cott (Days that I'll Remember: Spending Time with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 2012, etc.) conducted this interview with the woman he had known as a professor when he was a student, and RS published it the following year. It is reminiscent of a time when popular magazines would commit what now seems an unthinkable number of pages to the profile of a serious author. Though it ran long in the magazine, it runs much longer here, offering a conversational warmth that some might find more inviting than Sontag’s published work. Though she says, “I’m not really a polemicist,” she maintains that the writer’s mission is “to be in an aggressive and adversarial relationship to falsehoods of all kinds.” What she perceived as falsehoods were often controversial, but her interviewer never offers a hint of challenge. Cott is more like an acolyte, occasionally fawning, asking questions that reflect his own erudition. This interview ran a quarter-century before Sontag’s death, but it captured her at the peak of her cultural prominence, discussing Illness as Metaphor and On Photography, showing how slack metaphors and reductive interpretation misrepresent the essence of reality. Most illuminating is the personal detail—e.g., how she started reading seriously at 3 and “was writing up a storm by the time I was eight or nine years old.” What made her perfect for that magazine at that time was her pivotal role in the bridging of high and popular culture: “When I go to a Patti Smith concert at CBGB, I enjoy, participate, appreciate and am tuned in better because I’ve read Nietzsche.” Or, as she had previously written, “If I had to choose between the Doors and Dostoyevsky, then—of course—I’d choose Dostoyevsky. But do I have to choose?”
Another side of a significant 20th-century writer, preserved from the archives.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-300-18979-7
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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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