A fulsome portrait of a distinctive Harvard savant, nicely painted in full color.
When writing about family, it pays to have at least one fascinating relative, and Dawidoff hits the jackpot.
Alexander Gerschenkron (1904–78) was surely the most unforgettable character Dawidoff (ed., Baseball, p. 156, etc.) ever met. He was also the author’s grandfather, born in Odessa, escaped to Vienna when the Russian Revolution struck, and emigrated to the US when the Austrians greeted the Nazis. Gerschenkron—“Shura” to his friends—was a true Russian, an echt Viennese, and then, by natural evolution, a genuine American. His story is characteristic of many histories of successful adaptation by those who once arrived in “places where the languages and the bread were strange.” Continental in manner, Shura was the ultimate exemplar of self-assurance, a cool autodidact who, it seems, became adept in several academic disciplines and a score of languages. He was a cheater at lawn croquet, a Red Sox fan, and a voracious reader. Trained as an economist, Shura worked in a WWII shipyard and thence to the Fed. Finally, he landed at his beloved home base, Harvard, where he bared the secrets of bloated Soviet economic claims and where he trained the nation’s best economic historians. Shura’s impressive mind was, by turns, capable of fierce loyalty and dogged antipathy. Dawidoff details his grandfather’s relations with such worthies as John Kenneth Galbraith, Henry Rosovsky, and the late Sir Isaiah Berlin. Among people who knew everything, Shura, the rumpled charmer who never completed a magnum opus, was the ultimate know-it-all. He was certainly a wonderful figure to his grandson, who pays truly affectionate tribute. Readers may forgive minor lapses, like the passing reference to the noted wartime broadcaster as “Edmund R. Morrow” or acceptance of Shura’s dubious etymology for the word “robot.” The tale of Gerschenkron, his friends and family, his style and his disputes, amply exhibits the art of biography.
A fulsome portrait of a distinctive Harvard savant, nicely painted in full color.Pub Date: May 17, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40027-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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