by Paul Sorrentino ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2014
Sorrentino’s authoritative and sympathetic portrait revives a “bohemian rebel” and prolific, groundbreaking writer.
Thoroughly researched biography of Stephen Crane (1871-1900), who shocked his contemporaries with raw, gritty fiction.
Sorrentino (English/Virginia Tech; editor: Stephen Crane Remembered, 2006, etc.) faced challenges in writing this biography: mainly, previous books that perpetuated errors and lies and few sources to set the record straight. His study chronicles the personal and literary struggles of a controversial writer who vowed to live “a life of fire.” The youngest son in a large family of precociously intelligent children, Crane refused to follow in his father’s footsteps as a minister, instead hoping to train at West Point for a military career. However, his plan was deflected by an older brother’s advice to enter a mining-engineering program at Lafayette College. There, and later at Syracuse University, Crane was a mediocre student, preferring to drink, smoke, play poker and carouse with his fraternity brothers; he finally dropped out and moved to New York City, intent on becoming a writer. While barely supporting himself as a journalist, he finished a novel drawn from the life he observed in the city’s slums: “the bleak portrayal of a naïve, sentimental girl in the tenements of New York.” Unable to find a publisher for Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Crane published the book himself, winning praise from writer Hamlin Garland and influential editor William Dean Howells. The novel, Sorrentino writes, was “the first significant example of literary determinism in American literature,” but its candor and pessimism made critics wary of reviewing it. Three years later, though, The Red Badge of Courage, Crane’s psychological study of a Civil War soldier, generated adulation and fame. Good fortune was short-lived, however; bad business decisions and “questionable ethics” eroded what he earned, and Crane’s last years were fraught with financial troubles. He kept writing, always hoping for a fresh start, until tuberculosis killed him at the age of 28.
Sorrentino’s authoritative and sympathetic portrait revives a “bohemian rebel” and prolific, groundbreaking writer.Pub Date: June 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-674-04953-6
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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PROFILES
by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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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