culturally rich. Many readers will hope for a sequel.
The Russian-French-American painter and writer (Voices in the Snow, not reviewed, etc.) sketches her life and extensive
acquaintances from 1935 to 1975. The cosmopolitan Carlisle was born into a distinguished Russian family living in France. Her grandfather Leonid Andreyev was a leading pro-Soviet writer; her uncle Daniel was a mystical poet tortured and imprisoned by Stalin’s henchmen; he died shortly after a long term in the Gulag. She writes vividly of her coming-of-age and adult years in Paris, where she met and married Henry Carlisle, the American literary scholar, editor, novelist, and her eventual coauthor (The Idealists, 1999). He was descended from an old-line Protestant family in Nantucket, where the couple moved before the island became chic. Despite many descriptions of the natural world and the author’s in-laws, the Nantucket pages are far less interesting than Carlisle’s last major section, covering the 1950s and '60s, when the couple and their son, Michael, lived in New York City. Even though she resists the reigning school of abstract expressionism, the introverted, aesthetically independent Carlisle manages to be in the thick of things in the New York art world, getting to know such figures as Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko, as well as literary stars Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer. Unfortunately, except when she recounts her romance with Henry, Carlisle is reserved about her feelings and her family life, and sometimes slights important details in describing events and personalities. In an otherwise fascinating section, she describes how she and Henry came to represent Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn with Western publishers during the early 1970s and to translate part of The Gulag Archipelago, only to see the Nobel laureate turn furiously on them for what he felt were translating and publishing errors. Yet she never explains just what went wrong. While a significant number of passages here seem too cursory, Carlisle’s life emerges as stimulating, self-aware, and
culturally rich. Many readers will hope for a sequel.Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-25245-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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