Occasionally engaging, but too often lost among the stars.
Journalist and novelist Mewshaw (Shelter from the Storm, Mar. 2003, etc.) recalls his days as a fledgling in the tree of literature and examines the myriad influences of big birds named Garrett, Styron, Jones, Bowles, and Vidal.
There are some dazzling moments in this uneven memoir: James Jones’s catty comment about Hemingway’s oral sex with his shotgun is worth the cover price all by itself; and the long final chapter about Gore Vidal, with asides featuring Pat Conroy and Norman Mailer, coruscates with its subject’s wit. (Vidal once quipped, claims Mewshaw, that the three saddest words in the English language are “Joyce Carol Oates.”) The author can gore literary bulls, too. Accompanied by a tall model in an Italian restaurant, for example, Mailer “looked like a tiny tot in a Halloween costume.” But Mewshaw is drawn to celebrities like a fly to cream pie. He begins by describing how he convinced George Garrett to let him into a writing seminar at the University of Virginia, then segues into accounts of drinking with William Styron, dining with Harold Robbins and Robert Penn Warren and Anthony Burgess and Paul Bowles and Graham Greene (not at the same time). He chatted with Sharon Stone, saw Lindsay Wagner naked, and had a surreal shopping spree with Estelle Parsons in the desert. Mewshaw shows the sense to be self-deprecating at times; he publishes a strong letter from Graham Greene complaining about his published profile of the English writer, and he occasionally admits to various personal and professional failures. But he also seems more than determined to portray himself as an unjustly overlooked novelist, quoting—sometimes at length—flattering comments from Styron, Warren, and Burgess. Errors and careless prose undercut his claims. He attributes to Chairman Mao a quotation from Lao Tzu, misspells Edgar Allan Poe’s middle name several times, and too frequently finds language that is conventional rather than novel.
Occasionally engaging, but too often lost among the stars.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8071-2852-X
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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.
