Revelations about self-doubt, authority, competitiveness, and striving for recognition may resonate with other academics,...
A sabbatical year proves both personally and professionally stressful.
In his last book about three giants of the Lost Generation, Gandal (English/City Coll. of New York; The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and the Fiction of Mobilization, 2008, etc.) made the provocative argument that the three writers, frustrated by their failure to serve in World War I, infused their fiction with their own feelings of emasculation. He reprises that argument in his candid, digressive, often repetitious memoir about the sabbatical during which he fitfully embarked on a scholarly quest to formulate his insights and to find evidence to support them. Academic detective work is not all that occupied him: the book begins with a death threat, which is quickly dispatched and has little to do with the rest of the memoir except that it left him and his wife caring for his school-age niece. Besides driving her to and from school, the author hardly mentions the girl, and his wife similarly has a scant walk-on role. Instead, Gandal ruminates exhaustively on his frustrations with his field and the tribulations of scholarly work (he hates doing research, he admits); his literary discovery, which he reiterates throughout; and his new obsession with tennis, which he took up as a “refreshment from the mental strain of thinking and writing.” That strain was exacerbated by his feeling ostracized from academia because of “my profession’s seeming taboo on literary-historical research about the military” and some scholars’ refusal to see WWI as relevant to the works he was examining. Still, Gandal persisted in arguing that “American modernist style had been born out of nothing less than the need to hide these embarrassing mobilization wounds while being unable to stop writing about them and thus still compulsively writing about them.” His manuscript completed, he spent nail-biting months trying to find a publisher, feeling at the mercy of hostile manuscript reviewers.
Revelations about self-doubt, authority, competitiveness, and striving for recognition may resonate with other academics, less with general readers.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4214-2394-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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