A diverse group of writers, academics, physicians, and social activists reflect, with varying levels of insight and eloquence, on the career of playwright and AIDS provocator Larry Kramer. Mass (Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite: Being Gay and Jewish in America, 1994), a friend of Kramer's and a cofounder with him and several others of the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), edits this collection of essays by 23 contributors, including playwright Tony Kushner, book editor Michael Denneny, and former GMHC director Rodger McFarlane. Their different backgrounds illustrate the mix of themes in Kramer's own life. Patrick Merla introduces readers to Kramer's major public achievements: the film Women in Love, which Kramer produced; his novel, Faggots; his plays, The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me; AIDS organizations GMHC and Act-Up. The scope of Kramer's life and work is not so large that this collection can escape being wearisomely repetitive. The best essays relate a focused piece of Kramer's life, politics, or art to a broader framework, such as the history of gay theater, the African-American community, heterosexual families, or W.H. Auden's poetry (in pieces by Michael Paller, Canaan Parker, Sarah Trillin, and Alfred Corn, respectively). In an elegiac essay, Andrew Holleran reflects on the gay artist's world of the past 20 years, and Kramer's successful negotiation within it of the writer's block that is AIDS. Kramer himself has the last word, in an interview that closes the book, leaving the reader with a sense of his genuine, if conflicted, humanity. Tributes to those still living run the risk of grandiosity, to which the long collection sometimes succumbs; all but fervent admirers of Kramer's should read selectively.
Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-17704-6
Page Count: 405
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
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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