A fine biography that leaves few leaves unturned, and that should revive interest in Koestler’s work.
The first major biography in a quarter-century of Arthur Koestler (1905–83), today best known for the anti-Soviet novel Darkness at Noon (1940).
Scammell (Writing/Columbia Univ.; Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, 1984), translator of Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy, among others, has a handful of a subject in Koestler, who roamed continents and disciplines and gave new dimensions to the term “intellectual outlaw.” He was “Hungarian in his temper, German in his industry, Jewish in his intellectual ambition…[and] never comfortable in his own skin, doomed to oscillate between arrogance and humility.” Zelig-like, Koestler was everywhere at once, it seemed, throughout the most important episodes of the 20th century. He interviewed Sigmund Freud, carried documents that implicated the Nazis in the collapse of Republican Spain, hung out with Timothy Leary and Wernher von Braun, palled around with terrorists and Hollywood screenwriters and was known to Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler and Mussolini. Amid all that, he found time to write a half-dozen novels, countless articles and other books, growing improbably more prolific as he grew older. Scammell is more admiring of Koestler than other biographers (such as Iain Hamilton), who have ranked him as a middling novelist and willfully ignorant pop scientist. Yet Scammell somewhat wearily writes, after recounting Koestler’s championing of the Israeli magician/charlatan Uri Geller, “he pursued the grail of proving extrasensory perception to the end of his life, regardless of what the majority of his contemporaries (and his public) thought.” In this elegant biography, Scammell shows a troubled and sometimes troubling soul with an almost stereotypically meddlesome mother—“Don’t you have even a single nice memory of your childhood and youth?” she once demanded of him—and plenty of demons, susceptible to quack theories and big ideas. But he also generated big ideas for their own sake, led the life of the independent intellectual to the hilt and essentially lived as he wished.
A fine biography that leaves few leaves unturned, and that should revive interest in Koestler’s work.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-394-57630-5
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
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