Artistically and psychologically acute biography of the great American poet-playwright. Tennessee Williams (191183) named theatrical producer Leverich his authorized biographer in 1979, but a hostile executor of the estate blocked his work's publication until her death in 1994. First in a projected two volumes, this thoughtful assessment seems only to have benefited from the enforced wait: The novice author has ably organized well-known facts about Thomas Lanier Williams III's early years and provided a refreshingly in-depth perspective on the apprenticeship that ended in 1945 with the triumphant New York premiere of The Glass Menagerie, the first mature work of self-christened playwright Tennessee Williams. A complex, three-dimensional portrait emerges, far superior to previous shallow efforts by Donald Spoto and Ronald Hayman. Leverich identifies the principal conflict of Williams's life as the battle between his puritan and pagan instincts, a split reflected in his plays' central theme of the sensitive, artistic soul battered by a materialistic world and in his lifelong fear that he would go insane, like his beloved sister, Rose. Leverich places the writer's homosexuality in context, acknowledging it as a fundamental aspect of his personality but avoiding other biographers' tendency to make it the sole wellspring of his art, which Leverich convincingly argues owed at least as much to such literary influences as D.H. Lawrence, Anton Chekhov, and Hart Crane. The book has some faults: Its clearly defined main themes are repetitiously reiterated, and some judgments seem simplistic, such as the idea that ``Tom'' and ``Tennessee'' were always at odds and the contention that the writer never recovered from his inability to win his disapproving father's love. Leverich's serviceable prose could use a little of Williams's lyrical eloquence, but he nearly equals his subject in compassion and understanding of the tangled human heart. Affectionate and affecting, dense with arresting detail, likely to be definitive. (50 b&w photos, not seen) (First printing of 50,000; first serial to the New Yorker)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-517-70225-8
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
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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