After a long stretch of portentous yet limp throat-clearing, novelist Delbanco (Sherbrookes, etc.) offers the slim substance here: three small, chatty studies in literary "collegiality"—all of them involving writers who lived in the same area of England (Kent and East Sussex) around 1900. ("They drawl and carry pistols and flourish their umbrellas or their walking sticks. They will change the face of fiction in our time.") First come the last days of American wonder-boy and fun-loving host Stephen Crane—and how the others reacted to his early demise: Delbanco argues (not very persuasively) that, contra Leon Edel, Henry James did probably agonize over Crane's death; he suggests that Ford Madox Ford be given "the benefit of the doubt" re his purplish recollections of Crane; he celebrates the intense Crane/Conrad friendship; and he finally ponders Crane's artistic decline, ending up on a characteristically blurry note. ("Had he recovered, so might have the prose.") Then there's another look at the much-chronicled Conrad/Ford collaborations, with brief analysis of the different degrees of collaboration (re "Amy Foster," Nostromo, and Romance) and consideration of the partnership's influence on both writers' later work; Delbanco contends that "If Conrad gained in fluency while working on Romance, Ford learned profluence"—and that "Ford released the elder man to create profound scenarios by helping him to realize the surface of his texts." And, finally, there's the unlikely acquaintanceship of James and H. G. Wells ("It is as if Borges and Jimmy Breslin met for cocktails weekly")—a relationship that soon deteriorated into condescension from James and cruel parodies from Wells; yet here again Delbanco is determined to accentuate the positive, asserting that "What seems exceptional here is that Wells and James were close—not that they disagreed." Throughout, in fact, Delbanco leans on his Pollyanna-ish view of writer interaction so hard (especially in a goopy epilogue) that even his soundly-based points become suspect. And the sense of woolly-mindedness is compounded by the prose, which is slangy yet stuffy, with clichÉs running free ("forest for the trees," "with a grain of salt," "worth his salt," etc., etc.). All in all: familia material, sketchy—and unconvincingly didactic—treatment.
Pub Date: April 16, 1982
ISBN: 0881845841
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1982
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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