A long-overdue study that will surely spark new interest in Gardner’s work.
Thorough, knowledgeable, gossipy biography of a remarkable but little-celebrated American poet.
With a name shared by her eccentric aunt and patron of the arts, Isabella Stewart Gardner (1915–1981) found her own fame eclipsed shortly after her last collection was published, just before her death. “Eclipsed” proved the leitmotif of the younger Gardner’s life, as her monumental talent as a poet and actress was submerged under the lifelong weight of her aristocratic parentage and wealth, the stifling umbrage of four unsatisfying marriages, the exigencies of mopping up after her unstable children and the demands of her ultimately all-consuming alcoholism. Yet Gardner managed to release four collections of stunning poetry: Birthdays from the Ocean (1955), The Looking Glass (1961), West of Childhood (1965) and That Was Then (1979). She also established herself as a dogged poetry critic, especially during the four years she volunteered as manuscript reader for Poetry magazine under the tutelage of Karl Shapiro. With her marriage to Allen Tate from 1959 until 1966, Gardner became part of a sensational “literary team” whose parties were legendary. Janssen (The Kenyon Review, 1939-1970: A Critical History, 1990) ably fleshes out her subject, delving fearlessly into the rollicking, drunken complicated lives of these brilliant but troubled characters. The author answers her own questions about Gardner—“Where did she spring from, and why had she sunk into oblivion?”—by quoting extensively from her poetry and correspondence, and from those who knew her. She provides an intimate examination of this charming, intriguing, largely self-educated woman who either was sidelined by the paternal bias of the day or sabotaged her own gifts.
A long-overdue study that will surely spark new interest in Gardner’s work.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1898-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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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