With minimal redundancy, the voices culminate to illuminate an extraordinarily rich picture book, provide fresh insight into...
Conversations with the legendary children’s book creator, along with “companion guides” exploring the artist’s psyche and works.
This text expands longtime Rolling Stone contributing editor Cott’s (Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview, 2014, etc.) 1976 Stone interview with Sendak, which Cott reworked in his collection of children’s author profiles, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn (1983). The author interweaves discussions that followed over the years with family photographs, aesthetic influences, and book art in the first publication with the benefit of distance since Sendak’s death in 2012. Cott examines his subject's relationships with relatives—particularly the artist’s melancholy mother—and recurring themes and obsessions: babies, kidnapping, flying, falling, mortality, windows, and journeys. An overview of key titles follows, focusing on the enigmatic Outside Over There; Sendak described this conclusion to the trilogy that began with Where the Wild Things Are as “the last excavation of my soul.” Writing it helped vanquish lifelong demons. Cott is an erudite, sensitive observer, exceedingly well-prepared to engage readers on the title’s (and creator’s) mystique. Equally at ease probing Mozart’s views on death as he is the similarities between Sendak’s naked goblins and a 17th-century scene of frolicking putti, Cott’s thoughtful questions include quotes from luminaries ranging from Homer to Rumi. Sendak’s narrative featuring Ida, a girl who rescues her baby sister from the goblin’s underworld (as the depressed mother pines for the seafaring father), is expertly mined in separate chapters. Psychoanalyst Richard M. Gottlieb notes the artist’s gift for plots employing fantasy to manage rage, and Jungian analyst Margaret Klenck discusses art’s role in restoring one’s archetypal mother. Art historian Jane Doonan deconstructs design, style, and symbolism, while playwright Tony Kushner recounts his friend’s yearning for paradise. A continuous thread explores the complex interplay between “inside and outside” and the possibility that the story transpires in Ida’s imagination.
With minimal redundancy, the voices culminate to illuminate an extraordinarily rich picture book, provide fresh insight into human needs, and inspire appreciation for the rewards of looking closely.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-54043-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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