An occasionally rambling but effective dual biography.
An odd but appealing combination of memoir and biography of two significant French sibling intellectuals, André Weil (1906-1998) and Simone Weil (1909-1943).
Novelist and former Texas Observer editor Olsson (All the Houses, 2015, etc.) admits that her life, viewed on its own, might not suffice for a memoir. Seemingly marked for a career in the humanities, she entered Harvard and was drawn to the concrete, right-or-wrong nature of mathematics. At that time in life, she notes, “so much is up in the air, open to question, unreliable. I think part of what I liked about math, she writes, “was simply that it seemed like a sure thing, as sure as a thing could be, a solid mass of true and rigorous and irreproachable knowledge that I could grab like a pole on a bus.” The author held her own and graduated but chose to pursue a career in journalism while never losing her fascination with creativity, the epitome of which is the abstract purity of mathematics. Stirred by reading the Weil memoirs, letters between the two, and a series of internet lectures by a Harvard mathematics professor, Olsson delivers a mixture of philosophy with an account of their lives and her own. Simone was an activist, philosopher, and later mystic, little known during her short life but immensely influential to the postwar generation. Her intense sympathy for the oppressed was accompanied by an obsession with sharing their suffering (working at miserable jobs; semistarvation), ineffectual, often self-destructive efforts to help, and much introspection. She was close to her brother, a brilliant mathematician who often responded to her appeals to explain his work. The responses were no more comprehensible to Olsson than Simone, but they encouraged her to muse about the nature of creativity and write this unique meditation.
An occasionally rambling but effective dual biography.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-28761-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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
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