About the only flaw in the book is the subtitle, for Mencken seems to have been born old if not always wise. A pleasure for...
A superb study of the life of the cigar-chomping controversialist, civil libertarian and muckraker who remains the patron saint of journalists, at least of a certain age.
Henry Louis Mencken (always H.L., by way of distancing himself from readers) lived in a puritanical age very much like our own, though “he was anything but a moralist—an attitude, he realized, that made him incomprehensible to most Americans.” So writes Mencken anthologist and devotee Rodgers, who notes that her subject was born in the horse-and-buggy age and died in a time of jets and television: “when he was a child, typewriters were a novelty,” and when he was a cub reporter in Baltimore, the machines were held in suspicion of being somehow effeminate. He learned to peck away at one nonetheless, and with it to create a wide-ranging, astonishingly large body of work, committing something on the order of 10,000 words to paper every day—ephemeral journalism, articles and essays, letters and many books, including the still-standard American Language. A turn-of-the-century bon vivant, Mencken sometimes seemed trapped in the era between the Gilded Age and the First World War; certainly his attitudes toward blacks and Jews were of the 19th century, though he made efforts to overcome some of his prejudices, championing African-American writers as a critic and unsuccessfully urging that the Roosevelt administration admit German Jews fleeing from Hitler. Rodgers’s portrait is affectionate but critical; she does not hesitate to bring up troubling issues, and she even reveals that Mencken committed journalistic fictions worthy of Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair, including one in which he made up the details of a battle in the Russo-Japanese War—many of them, it turns out, correct, but made up all the same.
About the only flaw in the book is the subtitle, for Mencken seems to have been born old if not always wise. A pleasure for admirers of the cage-rattler, and the best Mencken biography to date.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-19-507238-3
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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
PERSPECTIVES
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