Memos packaged as a memoir from Village Voice and Washington Post columnist Hentoff (Listen to the Stories, 1995, etc.). Boston Boy (1986), his first memoir, told how Hentoff came to be the person he is. This volume tells how Hentoff came to the opinions he holds, which have made him one of American journalism's most passionate defenders of free speech and one of its most controversial opponents of abortion. Despite the book's billing, it's not much of a memoir. It comes off much better as a collection of essays that, for the most part, are as provocative and interesting as Hentoff's columns. He does not hold opinions lightly, nor does he shade his views to suit his audience or to curry favor. This assurance sometimes slips into self-righteousness—especially in the lengthy sections describing his views on abortion. Nor does Hentoff always come across, even in a book in which he gets to write what he wants about himself, as the nicest or most open-minded of men. But even at his hectoring, curmudgeonly worst, Hentoff tenders writing that is refreshing for its clarity of thought and voice. He credits his style to such journalist mentors as I.F. Stone and George Seldes, but even more to his first and abiding heroes, jazz musicians, "those embodiments of free expression." There are some inside stories here about life at the Voice and the New Yorker, where he was a long-time reporter, but was "retired" by its current editor, Tina Brown. And there are a couple of chapters about his wives and children, wedged in among the opinions. But it's opinions that command center stage here, with life as little more than the stage set. Perhaps Hentoff understood that, as interesting as his life may have been, the world needs ideas expressed clearly more than it needs another memoir.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-43647-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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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