Though tendentious, Rackstraw’s account offers enough interesting material on Vonnegut and his work to please his many fans.
Adorning her text with enough exclamation points to resemble an exuberant teen’s diary, the author recounts her long relationship with the noted American novelist.
It began in September 1965 when Rackstraw, a single mother, was enrolled in the married Vonnegut’s fiction class at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Coy about the extent of their intimacy, she remarks only that they “broke a couple of taboos that first year.” She remembers a bird singing when he first embraced her in a bucolic Iowa grove. She tells some Workshop stories: Parties at Andre Dubus’s place were “great”; Nelson Algren was cruel to one of her classmates; Richard Yates had issues. Rackstraw eventually married again, and she became friends with Vonnegut’s first wife, Jane, and their children. The author, however, remains cool throughout to Jill Krementz, the writer’s second wife, and recalls times when Vonnegut planned to divorce her. Rackstraw acknowledges her friend’s emotional, depressive side—he took negative criticism poorly and became gloomy at weak sales or rejections—but also highlights how hard he worked to write prose that seemed effortless. His later novels in particular, she notes, went through multiple false starts. The memoir reveals some questionable ethics on its author’s part as well: She wrote very favorable reviews of some Vonnegut novels for the North American Review, and readers may wonder if she told her editors the extent of her intimacy with him. Rackstraw follows Vonnegut’s career chronologically, reporting what he published, where he spoke (how the crowds loved him!) and what he wrote and said to her—all in terms most flattering to both parties. She quotes few letters in their entirety but does not neglect, for instance, to quote Vonnegut’s occasional encomiums to her intelligence and achievements.
Though tendentious, Rackstraw’s account offers enough interesting material on Vonnegut and his work to please his many fans.Pub Date: April 11, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-306-81803-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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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