A solid, if not fully revealing, biography.
The life of a venerated, enigmatic poet.
In 1943, after Marianne Moore first met Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) at a literary conference, she remarked to William Carlos Williams that Stevens “is beyond fathoming.” He was “so strange,” she added, “as if he had a morbid secret he would rather perish than disclose….” That secret remains hidden even in this well-researched life by veteran biographer Mariani (English/Boston Coll.; Gerard Manley Hopkins, 2008, etc.), who mines Stevens’ correspondence, lectures, and poetry to chronicle his personal and aesthetic evolution. Aspiring to be a poet, Stevens nevertheless acquiesced to his father’s advice to train as a lawyer; after failing to get a permanent position in a legal firm, at the age of 29 he took a job in the insurance business, which, “given his personality and the difficulties he had working with people,” proved a better fit than a law career. The following year, after five years of courtship and despite his father’s vehement opposition, he married Elsie Kachel. He would come to decide his father was right: Mariani portrays Elsie as shy, possibly agoraphobic, and, as Stevens saw her, cold and spiteful. The poet spent much time on the road for work, often extending business trips to frolic with friends; at home, the couple did not share a bedroom. Mariani does not reveal affairs, but he quotes Stevens extolling “Cuban señoritas” in Florida. Stevens’ early poetry, marked often by “comfortable tranquility,” obscured the poet’s ferocity, “the angry man, the raging bull piqued by the picador.” One business associate expressed sympathy for his daughter, “her father being what he was.” Stevens, acutely sensitive to critics, found easy publication in literary magazines and with book publishers. Praised by such influential poets as Williams and Moore, he won accolades, prestigious awards, and honorary degrees, and his reputation has grown since his death in 1955. Though Mariani delivers plenty of biographical details, he doesn’t entirely open up his subject’s “brilliant, funny, haunting, musical, dark, and often consoling world.”
A solid, if not fully revealing, biography.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2437-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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