This unsparingly forthright second memoir should ruffle some feathers that badly need ruffling.
Sequel to the prolific fantasy writer’s previous autobiography, Bio of an Ogre (not reviewed).
After the usual biographical details (a summary of the previous book; a childhood spent in England and Spain, and on to America, where he developed from a child considered subnormal into a superior college student), Anthony emphasizes the determination and persistence necessary to break into print (a workaholic, he considers “writer’s block” merely an excuse for not getting on with the job). With his straightforward, honest approach, Anthony has earned a certain notoriety in the publishing world: he never backs down when threatened by bullies, nor backs off when the facts are on his side (and, since he checks very carefully, mostly they are). He’s dedicated to his readers and spends two days a week answering fan mail. From this correspondence—the fans often pour their hearts out to him—he estimates that one in three or four girls suffer some form of sexual abuse: an appalling statistic, representative or not. Puzzled and resigned, he details the truly disgraceful behavior of most publishers—the current one not excepted—ranging from malevolent incompetence through outright fraud. His fellow SF/fantasy writers evince similarly complex conduct: Isaac Asimov (courageous, but in person a compulsive grabber of female breasts and buttocks); Keith Laumer (a snake in the grass, even before the stroke that tipped him over the edge); Gordon R. Dickson (a drunk who never fulfilled his potential); the irascible Harlan Ellison (a personality clash if ever there was one); the talented, tragic John Brunner. Editors get the treatment, too, from the meddlesome Lester Del Rey to the witty host of the famous Milford Writers’ Conferences, Damon Knight, who allows personal remarks as the basis for critical judgments.
This unsparingly forthright second memoir should ruffle some feathers that badly need ruffling.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-87464-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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