An intriguing look at a particularly influential life of letters and a treat for Mailer fans.
The late literary lion’s archivist shares 70 years of his missives.
Before he died at age 84, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Norman Mailer (1923-2007) penned 44 books. He also spent that time adapting plays, writing poetry, producing films, and helping to launch “New Journalism” and the Village Voice. In the course of all that activity, the Brooklyn boy–turned–Harvard man also wrote complex, caustic and sometimes-moving letters to some 4,000 individuals. Lennon (Norman Mailer: A Double Life, 2013) presents 716 of those letters, decade by decade, in their naked forms and without much introduction. The recipients represent a cavalcade of contrasting personalities ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. to Monica Lewinsky. Most are directed at Mailer’s family, friends and colleagues and find the World War II veteran supremely absorbed in his own ideas. Mailer aficionados will no doubt enjoy the behind-the-scenes looks at the making of seminal works like The Naked and the Dead, as well as the writer’s ongoing sparring matches with editors and critics. Back in 1958, fellow scribe William Styron received this warning: “So I tell you this, Bill-boy. You have got to learn to keep your mouth shut about my wife, for if you do not, and I hear of it again, I will invite you to a fight in which I expect to stomp out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit.” The legendary man of letters seems downright tame here, possessed of a certain kind of blue-collar charm that compliments his penchant for intellectualization. But one must also then consider that Mailer later stabbed the same woman he so steadfastly defended. She survived, but the author would go on to fulfill the prediction he made early on in life about becoming a serial groom. Apparently, Mailer hated writing letters and often found the exercise tortuous, but from Lennon’s collection, it appears that he loathed being disconnected even more.
An intriguing look at a particularly influential life of letters and a treat for Mailer fans.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6623-0
Page Count: 860
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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