With frequent imaginings and surmises, Svenvold conducts a literary séance, using hints and clues to conjure the spirit of...
Like Elvis, Elmer McCurdy pursued a lively theatrical career long after he died. A feckless western outlaw who was killed in 1911, he was finally interred in a Boot Hill grave 66 years later. His story, still a cult cowboy saga, is told anew by Svenvold (Soul Data, 1998), a poet turned earnest reporter.
The fabled highwayman—his name, without reason, is sometimes linked with Butch, Sundance, the Daltons and the James boys—was an inept train robber, spectacularly unsuccessful in his few bumbling forays against decent folk. From his native Maine, the young man went west in search of somebody’s fortune. In the Army there, he almost learned the rudiments of demolition. After discharge from Ft. Leavenworth, discovered in St. Joe lugging burglar’s tools, he was jailed briefly. He held up a train thought to be carrying abundant cash, though it yielded little more than a few bottles of rot-gut. McCurdy, 31, was soon killed by a posse. That’s just the start of his story. Dead, he entered showbiz. The undertaker kept his body for display, and the mummified remains eventually toured the country in sideshows. In time, employed by entertainment’s bottom-feeders, the mummy went to Hollywood to appear in exploitation flicks. Finally, he—or it—was discovered in a defunct amusement park, painted in Day-Glo and falling apart. Even now, his grave is visited by ballyhoo. The story has been told before, but Svenvold brings a poet’s touch to the western mythopoeia. Some of his topics are barely relevant, like a sketch of Douglas MacArthur; others are more germane, like a medical examiner’s work or the carney world.
With frequent imaginings and surmises, Svenvold conducts a literary séance, using hints and clues to conjure the spirit of McCurdy. Doing so, he presents a decidedly entertaining chunk of American pop culture. R.I.P., Elmer McCurdy.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-465-08348-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
