“In backpacks across America, Algren still lives.”
Since it’s been 25 years since the only comprehensive biography of Nelson Algren (1909-1981), this discerning book is welcome.
Wisniewski, a longtime Chicago reporter, knows Algren’s home turf well. As a teenager, he was already “on the outside,” enamored with the South Side’s “neighborhood pool sharks, gamblers, bootleggers, and sandlot baseball stars.” Although a poor student in high school, he graduated from college in 1931 with a degree in journalism. Next came hitching and riding boxcars across Depression-era America, meeting the down and out and acquiring a taste for gambling that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Algren wasn’t a born writer, but with hard work and great effort, he became one. His good friend Kurt Vonnegut said he was “enchanted by the hopeless, could not take his eyes off them.” The sale of an early story about robbery and murder to a magazine for $25 helped him secure a contract for his first novel. The New York Sun described his leftist, proletarian Somebody in Boots as a novel that “does not shrink from the harsh facts of violence, rape and human wretchedness.” The Works Progress Administration provided some much-needed income after his marriage in 1938, and he flirted with communism. Richard Wright helped him find a home for his next novel, Never Come Morning, which Hemingway called “good stuff.” Back home after a stint in the Army, Nelson started a lengthy, romantic relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. Wisniewski calls it “ridiculous, exotic, corny, impossible…and amazing.” They inspired each other. Nelson’s The Man with the Golden Arm, about drug addiction, was a “hit,” and Otto Preminger’s popular film version came out in 1955 (for which Algren was paid little). A Walk on the Wild Side, which he felt was his best book, came out a year later. When the impoverished author died in 1981, all his work was out of print. It’s good to have the irascible, bohemian chronicler of the streets back via this top-notch biography.
“In backpacks across America, Algren still lives.”Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61373-532-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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