Even the title of this collection of short pieces about famous writers he has known demonstrates that former Commentary editor and undying neocon guru Podhoretz (The Bloody Crossroads, 1986, etc.) continues to display the temperament that Shirley MacLaine attributed to Debra Winger: turbulent brilliance. Podhoretz proudly wears his scars from the ideological wars that convulsed the group of mostly Jewish, New York City intellectuals that he dubbed The Family. The quarrels between himself and his former colleagues on the left, he allows, often sound sectarian—an apt word to describe the shouting matches, awkward silences, and endless factionalism that rocked The Family every few years over such issues as Soviet expansion, Israel, Vietnam, and gay and women’s liberation. (Amazingly enough, the present volume doesn—t exhaust Podhoretz’s list of ex-friends, since he also says that he has parted company with Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Robert Brustein, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.) Podhoretz’s strengths as a polemicist surge from his determination to write from his gut, no matter where that may lead him, as well as from a passionate insistence that politics and the arts matter absolutely. Yet, despite tinges of nostalgia for the loss of the warmth and vitality he felt from his ex-friends, he also writes more frequently (and predictably) with shrill rhetoric. Nor does he seem to understand how strongly affronts to the egos of all cronies concerned figure in the ruptures he now chronicles. Many anecdotes here are unusually rich, including Allen Ginsberg yelling at the bourgeois Podhoretz, —We will get you through your children!—; in another, Norman Mailer tries to cajole the author into joining an orgy. But Podhoretz tends, tiresomely, to retrace old battlegrounds with recycled stories from previous contentious memoirs (e.g., Making It, 1967). This reminiscence at its best is suffused with wistfulness for the vanishing of intellectual community but suffers from an inability to reconsider as it remembers.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85594-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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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