A fine essay by Susan Spanier and a cleareyed post-mortem on Hemingway written by John Steinbeck in 1961 are highlights of a...
A worshipful homage to Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961).
Only the most ardent apostles of Hemingway, his era, and his oeuvre will find total satisfaction in this book. Katakis (A Thousand Shards of Glass: There Is Another America, 2014, etc.), steward of Hemingway's literary estate, and his guest essayists make much of the journalistic immediacy and chronologies of Hemingway's letters, just one element of Hemingway memorabilia housed at the John F. Kennedy Library. Unfortunately, the early examples are banal, and many of the later letters are uninspiring. Some readers may feel voyeuristic reading painfully personal letters from Hemingway to his family, various wives, and romantic infatuations and peevish or apologetic missives to fellow writers. One would think that correspondence between Hemingway and the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, and Maxwell Perkins might bristle with vitality, but these letters are largely unremarkable, and they are assembled in an oddly disjointed, out-of-sequence manner. The same is true of many of the photos, with the young Hemingway depicted on the same page as the man years older. While often evocative and revealing, the photos as a whole seem to have been selected with insufficient regard for illustrative value, like a family album or slapdash celebrity picture book. Katakis dismisses the “myth of Hemingway, some of which he created himself,” as “too simplistic,” yet he succumbs to it at points throughout the text. The narrative contains little sense of continuity apart from the editor's attempt at connective tissue: setting the important years of Hemingway's life in the context of other political and literary milestones. Otherwise, until coalescing in the final third, the book caroms about in time and place.
A fine essay by Susan Spanier and a cleareyed post-mortem on Hemingway written by John Steinbeck in 1961 are highlights of a book that should have managed more resonance.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4208-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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.
