A pleasant addition to Thompsoniana, though only completists will find it required reading.
It was bound to happen. First Ralph Steadman bares all (The Joke’s Over: Ralph Steadman on Hunter S. Thompson, 2006), and now the neighbors come bearing savage tales of the late, great gonzo god.
Hunter S. Thompson was lucky to have landed on a spot where the sheriff turns a blind eye to funny-smelling smoke and white lines not on the highway. Said sheriff has served his constituency well enough that they’ve returned him to office every election since 1986, though Braudis must have wished at times for a quieter and more law-abiding constituent, especially when Thompson discharged a firearm—a favorite pastime—directly into one of his employees. “Well, it could be marginal, and I emphasize marginal, criminal endangerment,” says the D.A., on hearing the improbable tale of the disappearing bear whom Thompson was aiming at. Concludes Braudis, “Hunter got a lecture from me, ranging from condemning cavalier reliance upon firearms to suggesting alternatives to ‘bounce-shooting’ in the interest of bear mitigation,” adding that though Thompson was miffed, the friendship survived. Aspen artist Cleverly chimes in with tales of his own, recounting odd encounters with Thompson groupies—a less sane lot than most, not surprisingly—and ingestions in the company of the grand man himself, who, we learn, mumbled not just when onstage and was even less reliable and regularly more tweaked than even the fiercest of previous reports revealed. Yet Thompson was also a Southern gentleman capable of ordinary chivalry and much generosity, and, of course, a hero to his friends, who thankfully keep the hero worship set to low here. “Not that Hunter didn’t merit the awe,” writes Cleverly. “It’s just that those who knew Doc knew that an attitude of awe rarely paid off.” There are even a few matters for biographers to ponder: Did Thompson really spend time in Saigon? Was he really pals with V.S. Naipaul?
A pleasant addition to Thompsoniana, though only completists will find it required reading.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-115928-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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