A solid, much-needed work of literary biography, stronger on matters critical but a touch less absorbing, because less...
A searching life of the eminent literary critic and journalist 1895-1972).
It was Edmund Wilson’s conceit, first voiced in the essay “The Wound and the Bow” and often repeated, that the artist bears an internal wound whose healing lies in making art, but who can never be healed. Ever the man of letters—he died at a table strewn with galleys and “a dog-eared copy of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, with which Dickens had been struggling at his death”—Wilson bore psychic wounds of his own. Perhaps self-servingly, he insisted that the man (or woman) of letters was also a wounded hero, and “Bunny” Wilson was surely something more than ink-stained drudge; as Dabney (English/Univ. of Wyoming; Edmund Wilson: Centennial Reflections, 1997) observes, he lived up to the challenge of a kind of Hemingwayesque life, lived “all the way up,” always by his wits and with his pen. (Only late in life, and then grudgingly, did Wilson accept academic largess, and then he irritated its bestower, Paul Horgan, by asking whether Horgan wrote.) Dabney follows Wilson’s brilliant trajectory from protected youth to Jazz Age high-liver and liver-damaged “literary alcoholic,” from sexual naïf to the chronicler of suburban sexual high-jinks in Memoirs of Hecate County, from somewhat snooty highbrow to much more worldly highbrow. For all the life changes—and all the adventures and misadventures in the company of Edna Millay, Mary McCarthy, the Algonquian Circle, Vladimir Nabokov and such—Wilson remained consistent to at least a few principles and pleasures, confessing, for instance, “that he was never happier than when telling people about a work they were unfamiliar with in a language they didn’t know.” That he did so in the pages of The New Yorker, The New Republic and Vanity Fair ought to make his admirers—and Wilson still has many, having, as Dabney observes, passed the ten-year test for longevity long ago—yearn for better, more lettered days.
A solid, much-needed work of literary biography, stronger on matters critical but a touch less absorbing, because less sensational, than Jeffrey Meyers’s Edmund Wilson (1995).Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-11312-2
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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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