The son of Ross Lockridge, Jr., who committed suicide at 33 following the publication of his inventive, 1066-page novel Raintree County (1948), cuts his father a new suit and redresses an injured great American writer. Few readers know much more about Ross Lockridge, Jr., than was depicted in John Leggett's dual biography (Ross and Tom, 1974) of Lockridge and Thomas Heggan, the author of Mister Roberts (1977), a book about two literary suicides who seemingly could not face vast success. Leggett's Lockridge, a motormouth egomaniac, we now see was under-researched and as far off as a funhouse mirror. Larry Lockridge here faces the double task of writing a biography of his father and of finding out what drove him to a ruthless act of self- destruction. In doing this, he has produced what amounts to a major work on depression: a superb analytic description of clinical depression as it was understood vaguely in 1948 and more fully today. At the same time, he describes a great American tragedy, the story of a midwestern hero of great gifts who inherits the spirit of Whitman but comes to grief against a stone wall of materialism built by Houghton Mifflin, MGM, and the Book of the Month Club, to shrink the hero's great work down to salability. The hero's tragic flaw is ``competitiveness.'' Known as ``A-plus Lockridge'' because of his unrivaled scholarly achievements, a master of many languages, a writer possessed of photographic memory who could type 100 words a minute, an athlete who married the most beautiful and intelligent woman he'd ever met, Lockridge set out to surpass Joyce, Wolfe, Melville, and Hemingway only to pull his country's commercial monoliths down on his head, with MGM then erecting a terrible movie as his marker. An immensely moving book, deserving of the Pulitzer Prize that went to James Gould Cozzens's dreary Guard of Honor in 1948.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-85440-9
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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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