Sandburg's long life (1878-1967) illustrates the great American success story: Emerging from an austere Swedish immigrant background, through work, discipline, clean living, and high thinking he achieved fame, love, power, and money, and was identified at his death, at age 89, with the voice of America. This massive authorized biography, from first-time author Niven, is comprehensive, factual, and sentimental, and captures the ``honey'' and ``salt'' that Sandburg found in his life. Starting as a hobo (as he claimed at heart he remained), Sandburg had a varied and demanding literary career: years as a journalist in Chicago, volumes of poetry, the best-selling Lincoln biography, songs, children's stories, novels, platform lectures (at which he excelled), radio and film scripts (The Greatest Story Ever Told), recordings, and the text to The Family of Man—Edward Steichen's renowned photographic exhibit. Committed to the crude, virile, simple, and passionate life of the laboring classes, he nevertheless befriended movie stars (Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe), Presidents (Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson), and a glittering array of poets (Eliot, Auden, Pound, Frost, Wallace Stevens), and performed wherever he was invited (on the Milton Berle show, the Library of Congress, and nearly all the major universities in the country). He married into the creative Steichen family, finding in Paula his ideal mate to whom, Niven argues, he remained faithful for nearly 60 years. Of their three daughters, one became a writer, and the other two remained at home with Paula, who raised goats at Connemara, the farm they purchased in North Carolina—now a tourist attraction. For such a voluble man, Sandburg was personally reticent. Niven's study, then, is by necessity a chronicle of events, dates, places, awards, names, reviews, political and literary activities, and poems that she interprets with tact and appreciation. It vindicates Paula's observation to the insecure young poet: ``The life we live is more important than the works we achieve. You are the Achievement.'' (Two eight-page photo inserts—not seen.)
Pub Date: July 22, 1991
ISBN: 0-684-19251-9
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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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