There’s a compelling story in this late-in-life memoir, which is at its best when Dickstein sticks to that story.
An esteemed cultural and literary critic charts the intellectual and religious paths of his early years, sometimes saying too much in the process.
In this varyingly astute and chatty memoir, Dickstein (Emeritus, English and Theater/CUNY Graduate Center; Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, 2009, etc.) recalls his journey from Lower East Side yeshiva boy to Ivy League academic and critic. Along the way, he lost inhibitions, struggled against ingrained Jewish beliefs and customs, and contracted at least as many neuroses as he shed. Dickstein had the good fortune to come of age during the late 1950s and 1960s, when books (and eventually movies) were still at the center of cultural debate. The author was part of that conversation, and he leaves indelible portraits of his contemporaries and mentors. There’s the brilliant Lionel Trilling, who tended to wing his way through lectures; F.R. Leavis, a “slash and burn” critic cowed by his imperious wife; and the redoubtable Harold Bloom, who even then was already the smartest guy in every room. Dickstein also ably captures his own nervous embrace of secular culture, as the world of his youth proved all but impervious to assault. “As a freethinking intelligence yet a child of the ghetto, a vagrant offshoot of a venerable tradition,” he writes, “I would either learn to live with contradictions or perish under their weight.” He was both old and young; a member of the Columbia University establishment during the protests of 1968, his sympathies were squarely on the side of the students. He’s still that young man in many ways; while the book can get long-winded, especially as he recalls trips abroad, Dickstein hasn’t lost his zeal for art or ideas or his passion for writing about them.
There’s a compelling story in this late-in-life memoir, which is at its best when Dickstein sticks to that story.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0871404312
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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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