May not prompt readers to devour the novels, but succeeds in recreating a reckless era and shows Southern as one of its...
A compassionate survey of the life and times of Dr. Strangelove screenwriter and 1960s bad boy Southern, revealed here as a man of great kindness and personal excess.
Arts writer Hill draws on a decade-long association with Southern as deep background for his biography, which is supported by the cooperation of the writer’s estate and dozens of interviews. Beginning with Southern’s rowdy, literary Texas youth, Hill charts his years (after WWII service) amidst the hip in Paris and Greenwich Village, highlighted by publication of novels—including The Magic Christian (whose outrageous protagonist, Guy Grand, shadowed Southern throughout his life). A summons to London from Stanley Kubrick to work on Dr. Strangelove inaugurated Southern’s retreat from the “Quality Lit” game into the bigger canvas of international filmmaking and the “real-life movie called the sixties.” Accomplishments ranging from Easy Rider to teaching at Columbia followed, as did drugs, liquor, and, finally, his death at 71 in 1995. Throughout, Hill is informed and low-key about Southern’s starry world, providing restrained briefs for newcomers on the people of the moment (like Henry Green), happening restaurants like Elaine’s, and the importance of appearing on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (as Southern did). The only problem with such vividness is that Hill’s discussions of Southern’s literary efforts pale in comparison, leaving his concluding analysis of “enduring influence” unconvincing. But Hill’s ability to capture the “blur of movement from one groovy scene to the next” points to how potent the high life was and how it must have affected Southern.
May not prompt readers to devour the novels, but succeeds in recreating a reckless era and shows Southern as one of its merry players. (illustrations not seen)Pub Date: March 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-380-97786-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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