A charmless collection of 37 prose pieces (including essays, reviews, dialogues, even obituaries) by the Pulitzer Prizewinning composer and writer (Knowing When to Stop: A Memoir, 1994, etc.). Some are too short to have much impact: A piece on Ravel and Debussy is only five paragraphs long, consisting of program notes for a song recital. Others have more heft, including an essay exploring Debussy's influence on Bart¢k and Stravinsky, and a celebration of W.H. Auden. Ultimately, though, these pieces are mainly about Rorem. One learns that ``as a kid I not only loved Josephine Baker, I wanted to be her when I grew up.'' And that he feels at times as if ``Culture no longer existed, and that Learning, hand in hand with nuanced creativity, was hiding underground.'' (This reflection follows his observation that the New York Times Book Review and Vogue don't call anymore.) Rorem's two appreciations of Cocteau, clearly a great influence in his life, seem wildly exaggerated in their praise and terribly selective in their recitation of Cocteau's personal history. No mention is made of Cocteau's flagrant sucking up to the Nazis during the occupation of France; as a result, Rorem's description of Cocteau's postwar despair, attributed to a fickle public, seems a somewhat misleading gloss. His tributes to the departed often seem rather flat. Dawn Powell, in her recently published diaries, tells us more about Elizabeth Ames, the longtime director of Yaddo, in one precise page than Rorem does in six. There are, of course, some rewards in all the chatter: a fine limerick penned by Rorem's father after attending an incomprehensible lecture by Arnold Schoenberg; a portrait of a young Pierre Boulez serving as a rehearsal pianist in a run-through of Samuel Barber's violin concerto, attended by the caustic Barber; the recollections of Dr. Lox, who attended both Bart¢k and Stravinsky on their deathbeds. Overall, though, a petty scolding of those of whom Rorem disapproves, and a roaring tribute to himself.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-82249-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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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