A largely admiring mosaic with some pieces that glisten and illuminate.
Freelance writer and editor Aldrich (Old Money: The Mythology of Wealth in America, 1996)—the former Paris editor of The Paris Review—presents a disjunctive but often affecting cut-and-paste oral biography of Plimpton (1927–2003).
With his editorial team, including Plimpton’s widow and ex-wife, Aldrich arranged for some 374 interviews with people who’d known Plimpton in various capacities. Family, classmates, lovers, staffers, axe-grinders (not too many), fans and fools—all offered memories, conclusions, regrets, appreciations. Aldrich employs a rough though never rigid chronology throughout these reminiscences, which vary in length from a few sentences to a page or two. Some of the contributors—Mary Lee Settle and Norman Mailer among them—died before the book’s publication date. Mailer offers some incisive observations, including a comic and touching exchange with Philip Roth about urination at Plimpton’s memorial service. We hear about Plimpton’s patrician accent; his tennis skills (considerable); his bicycling (always sans helmet); his failures in school (Exeter bounced him); his struggles to establish himself in the literary world; his seductiveness with donors to his review; his drinking and partying (including some attendance at orgies). His determination appears throughout. While researching his landmark 1966 book, Paper Lion, he endured physical punishment from the Detroit Lions but never missed a practice. He remained editor of the The Paris Review until his dying day. He continued to support his first wife when her second marriage disintegrated. Many people remember that he was a masterful toastmaster—the best in New York, admitted a grudging Mailer. There are also many amusing moments scattered about, as when someone observed him entering “Malcolm X” into his address book under “X.” The impressive contributors list reads like a literati’s dream: among many others, Chris Cerf, Robert Gottlieb, Philip Gourevitch, Hugh Hefner, P.J. O’Rourke, William Styron, Gore Vidal and Edmund White.
A largely admiring mosaic with some pieces that glisten and illuminate.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6398-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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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