So, is some Settle better than none? A resounding yes.
When she died in 2005, novelist and memoirist Settle (Spanish Recognitions: The Roads to the Present, 2004, etc.) was still working on this affecting memoir of her experiences before, during and after World War II.
Is some Settle better than none? Editor Freeman certainly thinks so, and much of this justifies her judgment. Although Freeman says the text lacks only the “final touches,” it is missing much more—not just sections the author certainly would have expanded or added but also stylistic consistency. Still, there is much to admire and make us wish for more. Settle begins in the pivotal summer of 1938, when, in love with Shakespeare and animated by her experiences at Virginia’s Barter Theatre, the 19-year-old decided to eschew her undergraduate career at Sweet Briar and flee to New York to seek her fortune. She had some successes (she rode an elevator with Harpo Marx, got to read for Scarlett O’Hara), some failures (she was certain William Castle was going to use her in a film; he didn’t). She tried modeling, and then, not long after Hitler invaded Poland, married a young Englishman and delivered his child; they separated during the war. Gradually, Settle began to realize that she was a writer. It’s not a profession you choose, she notes: “You are conscripted.” She tried poems and journalism and propaganda, working in England for the Office of War Information, before she transformed herself into a novelist with the ferocious determination and tenacity to endure the myriad rejections she received before The Love Eaters was accepted in 1953. Settle likes to talk about the literary celebrities she knew. There are good set pieces here about a nice lunch with Eliot and a nasty encounter with Maugham.
So, is some Settle better than none? A resounding yes.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-05732-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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