The reclusive author and designer of such ghoulish gems as The Doubtful Guest and the animated introduction to the PBS...
A well-considered biography of Edward Gorey (1925-2000).
Cultural critic Dery (I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams, 2012, etc.) constructs a nimble framework to fully appreciate the gothic artist and designer’s contributions to high art and queer culture, developments that mirror the popularization of art and literature after World War II as well as the campy “hiding-in-plain-sight” nature of the pre-Stonewall gay experience. The author probes his subject’s close, unconsummated relationships with school friends, an Army librarian during the war, and, later, picture-book collaborator Peter Neumeyer to prove no exception to Gorey’s official line that he was “reasonably undersexed or something.” Comparisons to Edwardian throwback novelists Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett place Gorey’s macabre rightfully at the heights of aestheticism and the surrealist vanguard, only he aimed his “revolt through style” at the gloomy British past. Dery’s puzzling subject, the son of a prominent Chicago publicist, shines brightest in the early years. He caught the art bug early in his youth, under private school teacher Malcolm Hackett, and he later jousted at Harvard with verse prodigies like John Ashbery and Gorey’s freshman roommate, Frank O’Hara. Following a Cambridge connection with publisher Jason Epstein, Gorey settled in New York to illustrate a famous run of Anchor paperback covers. Soon after, he was designing his first books, darker than Dr. Seuss and as visionary as Maurice Sendak. When he became a “cottage industry” in the 1970s, through merchandise at Gotham Book Mart and his design of the smash-hit Dracula on Broadway, Gorey was able to transcend the pop culture he also actively consumed, discussing the X-Files with fans later in his Cape Cod retirement.
The reclusive author and designer of such ghoulish gems as The Doubtful Guest and the animated introduction to the PBS series Mystery! comes fully alive, fur-coated and bejeweled, as an unlikely icon of the counterculture.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-18854-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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