No overachievement itself, this is likely to disappoint loyal McMurtry fans.
A glancing memoir by McMurtry (Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, 1999, etc.), an extraordinarily talented spinner of tales, the author of such bestselling and critically acclaimed titles as Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show.
His recent turn to writing travel memoirs (Roads, 2000, etc.) has produced less satisfactory results, however, and here he recounts a Polynesian cruise on which representatives of various nationalities behave in silly and predictable ways—the Germans slugging beer, the French casting snide looks, the Danes retreating into their cabin for libidinous fun—while he combs the ship looking for something interesting to read and takes notes on the passing scene. His descriptions of the people he encounters seldom transcend travel-magazine captioneering: “The girls were lovely, with hip movements that would have earned them immediate employment at any lap-dancing establishment in Las Vegas,” or “The Tahitians . . . aren’t lazy, but neither are they harried. They seem happy, competent, friendly, talkative.” More interesting are his bookish asides on the writers and artists who have made their way to the South Seas—Robert Louis Stevenson, Paul Gauguin, Henry Adams, and the like. More interesting still, if oddly juxtaposed, is his account of his parents’ sad marriage, which began with much promise but ended in bitterness. “He was a bright hope,” he writes, “so was she—and yet life turned out from under them like a fine cutting horse will turn out from under an inexperienced rider.” McMurtry ties these threads together, but only very loosely, with random thoughts on the quest for earthly paradise, or at least “escape from the culture of overachievers.”
No overachievement itself, this is likely to disappoint loyal McMurtry fans.Pub Date: June 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1565-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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
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
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