From nonagenarian expatriate Green (The Green Paradise, p. 1233, etc.): a collection comprised of essays, lecture notes, and a short story written in 1920, when the author was a student at the University of Virginia. Like papers retrieved from a trunk in the attic, a few of these pieces carry a whiff of the antique—but there's also much to savor and enjoy. Born in France to American parents, Green grew up bilingual, although—as he admits in ``An Experiment in English''- -``as a child I could not believe English was a real language, to me the real names of things were French.'' This dichotomy leads Green to analyze the difficulty of writing in another language; the way in which language shapes material; and the challenges that writers face in exile. He cites a poignant encounter in wartime London with his great friend AndrÇ Gide, who wanted to ask a bus conductor for directions; though Gide could talk easily with English-speaking literati, he was ignorant of colloquial English. This subtle difference between language and nationality is further explored in ``Translation and the Fields of Scripture,'' while, in ``On Keeping a Diary,'' Green writes about the difficulty of telling the truth as well as of giving an accurate self-portrait- -``one of the most hazardous occupations because it involves the whole of a man's personality, good and bad.'' Other notable pieces include a lecture on ``How a Novelist Begins''—which remains relevant and fresh, as do ``Eight Lectures on Novel Writing''—and a memoir, ``As I Look Back,'' recalling Paris between the wars and Green's friendship with writers like Gide and Cocteau. The short story (``The Apprentice Psychiatrist'') and some recollections of now-forgotten French writers and literary salons have not worn as well. Elegant evocations of a golden age when writers wrote—and lived well—in Paris, which truly was the city of light.
Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1993
ISBN: 0-7145-2956-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
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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