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
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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