A graceful, absorbing meditation on two lives.
A writer discovers herself as she searches to understand Doris Lessing (1919-2013).
In her mid-30s, married with a young son, Feigel (English/King’s Coll., London; The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love, and Art in the Ruins of the Reich, 2016, etc.) became obsessed with the idea of freedom. A miscarriage strained her marriage, and as desperately as she wanted another child, she also felt conflicted about the inherent constraints of motherhood. Struggling to define the “existential feeling” of freedom and its consequences for a woman’s life, Feigel turned to Lessing, for whom liberation was a pressing concern and recurring theme, mining her works and her life in an attempt “to understand freedom as Lessing conceived it and as we might apprehend it now, politically, intellectually, emotionally, and sexually.” Thoroughly immersed in Lessing’s work, Feigel decided that there seemed an “urgent and personal liberation to be found in pursuing Lessing herself: in hunting her down as a way of giving the side of me that identified with her the space and time it needed to emerge.” Combining memoir, biography, and sensitive close readings of Lessing’s fiction and autobiography, Feigel creates an unusually intimate exploration of the intertwining of Lessing’s life with her own. As much as she admired Lessing, two facets of her life were problematic: her abandonment of her two young children, which Lessing saw as “a necessary condition” of her pursuit of freedom; and her continued membership in the Communist Party. Lessing’s “love affair with communism,” Feigel writes, “left me both envious and shocked”: shocked by her attempts to defend Stalin; envious of the reckless excitement of a love affair as well as “her determination to be always complicated: to question everything—not only what those around her thought, but what she herself thought.” Despite all of Lessing’s “energy and talent,” her life inevitably “narrowed” in ways she could not control, leading Feigel to redefine freedom for herself as a “surprisingly joyful knowledge of my own powerlessness.”
A graceful, absorbing meditation on two lives.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63557-095-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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