This new offering in the expanding and increasingly noteworthy field of Chekhov studies lacks both the original scholarship and the intellectual depth of other recent studies. Callow (From Noon to Starry Night, 1992; Lost Earth, 1995) has made a career of writing biographies of artistic greats, from CÇzanne to Walt Whitman. Turning his attention to a writer clearly dear to his heart, he opens his study with sentimental musings on seeing his first performance of a Chekhov work at the age of 22. This opening immediately sets the tone for a biography that takes us on a bumpy and highly personal journey through Chekhov’s life and work. Callow covers the usual ground: Chekhov’s youth in Taganrog, his move to Moscow, medical school, family affairs, the writing life, and his marriage to the actress Olga Knipper. He also interweaves mostly tedious commentary on and synopses of individual stories and plays into the narrative, and includes extended excerpts from Chekhov’s texts and letters. Callow’s narrative, from the very start, lacks structure (for instance, his information about serfdom in Russia is never given a proper context or carried through to form an argument) and tends to wander in too many directions. Furthermore, his staccato style (“he” can be repeated a dozen times in as many sentences) becomes irritating. As suggested by the biography’s subtitle, Callow’s loosely defined central interest in Chekhov is the “hidden,— or emotional, life of the author and the recurrent themes of romantic disillusionment and the search for intimacy that appear in Chekhov’s plays and short stories. But these are subjects that have long interested scholars and literary critics, and have generated considerable interesting work. Callow’s overly simplistic biography fails to convey the source of Chekhov’s genius. Interested readers would benefit more from their own reading of Chekhov, or from the more stimulating biographies of Donald Rayfield or V.S. Pritchett. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: May 15, 1998
ISBN: 1-56663-187-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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