This incisive, groundbreaking portrait of the enigmatic and influential poet will be indispensable to all future...
The first “comprehensive” biography of the American poet’s early years.
Roffman (Humanities/Yale Univ.; From the Modernist Annex: American Women Writers in Museums and Libraries, 2010) met Pulitzer Prize–winning poet John Ashbery (b. 1929) in 2005 at Bard College, and they immediately hit it off. The “vehemently private” poet provided her with an early diary and handwritten and typed manuscripts of poetry, plays, and stories, as well as numerous photographs (included here along with many poems). All of this material, writes Roffman, provides “astonishing record of his earliest creative life.” When the author asked if she could write a biography of these early years, he assumed she “already was.” Roffman delivers a revealing, unprecedented portrait of this artist up to the publication of Some Trees in 1956, which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.H. Auden, narrowly beating out Ashbery’s close friend Frank O’Hara. Born in Rochester, New York, he spent time on the family’s farm and in his beloved grandparents’ home overlooking Lake Ontario. His youth was “ordinary,” and he loved to paint, write, and read. He wrote his first poem at age 8 and read an article about surrealism and Dada in Life that “thrilled him.” As early as kindergarten, Ashbery felt attracted to boys but kept his feelings secret. In 1941, he appeared on the national Quiz Kids show in Chicago. After attending Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, he went to Harvard. At the time, he said, “I suppose I’ll come out of it intact.” Midway through his college career, Ashbery had ambitious plans to “rip modern poetry wide open!” At Harvard, he met poets O’Hara and Kenneth Koch and immersed himself in the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. Next came Columbia University and a new, lifelong friend in fellow gay poet/collaborator James Schuyler.
This incisive, groundbreaking portrait of the enigmatic and influential poet will be indispensable to all future biographical work.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-29384-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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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