A useful addition to Sybille Bedford’s two-volume authorized life of Huxley, drawing on letters and memoirs that have...
Capable biography capturing the English writer in his many guises: artist, aesthete, acidhead, even happy and well-loved man.
Born in 1894, Huxley died on the day JFK was assassinated; understandably, news of his passing was buried deep inside the papers, and soon he was all but forgotten save as a kind of psychedelic prophet, thanks to his consciousness-expanding experiments with LSD and mescaline in the 1950s. But in his time he had acquired considerable fame for such fiction as Point Counter Point and After Many a Summer Dies a Swan, better liked by general readers than critics. In between his many novels, Huxley wrote travel journalism, essays, and eccentric philosophy that blended his psychotropic voyages with the wisdom of the East by way of southern California (“Like everyone else,” he wrote, “I am functioning at only a fraction of my potential”). Only a few of his 50-plus books are now in print, though he is well-known for (and, really, only for) the dystopian Brave New World. Murray makes a good case for Huxley’s value as a writer on a level with at least some of the Bloomsbury crowd; Virginia Woolf, it happens, was an early champion, though she warned in print that “we would admonish Mr. Huxley to leave social satire alone, to delete the word ‘incredibly’ from his pages, and to write about interesting things that he likes.” His biographer also finds reason to criticize Huxley’s work (as did the self-aware author himself) for its didacticism and undervaluing of plot and drama in favor of proselytizing on such matters as the generation gap and the dangers of totalitarianism. Nonetheless, Huxley emerges from Murray’s pages as a decent, contented, and pleasant person whose life and work merit our regard.
A useful addition to Sybille Bedford’s two-volume authorized life of Huxley, drawing on letters and memoirs that have surfaced in the 30 years since its publication.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30237-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
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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