A thorough and welcome summing-up of a towering achievement in the modern theater.
Veteran show-biz biographer Gottfried (George Burns, 1996, etc.) strikes just the right balance between the work and the life in his judicious assessment of the great American playwright.
Now 87, Arthur Miller doesn’t come across as the warmest of men, and he agreed to be interviewed only about his plays, not his personal life. But he granted permission to read and to quote from unpublished material and correspondence, of which Gottfried has made good use; in particular, letters to Elia Kazan, Miller’s closest friend and best director of his work until Kazan’s HUAC testimony estranged them, reveal the funnier, earthier side of a man whose public pronouncements were usually solemn. From his first commercial success with All My Sons in 1947 and the transcendent triumph of Death of a Salesman in 1949, Miller was viewed as the artistic and political conscience of the American theater. He courageously refused to name names and produced a searing parable about witch-hunting, The Crucible, at the height of McCarthyism in 1953. But his draining marriage to the troubled Marilyn Monroe (well described with sympathy for both) didn’t leave much time for writing; nine years elapsed between the premieres of A View from the Bridge and After the Fall, the latter drawing savage reviews in 1964 for its candid portrait of the recently deceased Monroe. Miller was beginning to be patronized by critics as a stodgy social realist, a misunderstanding Gottfried refutes in his exegeses of the later plays, such as The Archbishop’s Ceiling, disdained in New York but received with respect in London. The English championing of Miller in the 1980s and ’90s eventually had an impact: by the beginning of the 21st century, writes Gottfried, “Miller’s place in theater history, already secure elsewhere, was finally established in his own country.” Despite occasionally caustic comments about his subject’s personality, the author’s overall esteem for Miller’s talent and integrity is evident throughout.
A thorough and welcome summing-up of a towering achievement in the modern theater.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-306-81214-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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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