A profusion of artful letters, the greater part from the mellifluous pen of Carson, detailing everyday life while writing The Edge of the Sea and Silent Spring. It's a wonder that Carson ever had a spare moment to churn out her books, considering the sheer tonnage of letters she produced and the obvious care and attention that went into every one. The letters from Freeman — Carson's Maine coast neighbor — can also be a pleasure, with their descriptive energy (editor Martha Freeman is her daughter), but the bulk are Carson's, and there lies the main interest. Carson's letters are deeply personal, and access to them has the quality of secretly sharing an intimate conversation floating over from a nearby café table: "... always the sense of your presence, and your sweet tenderness, and love was very real to me." There are forays into nature writing, with much birding and poking around tidal pools; and — this is the correspondence of two friends, after all — there's talk of furniture and clothes, hair styles and manicures. Carson, not surprisingly, is most compelling when expressing how she feels about her writing: her fears concerning its quality; the frustrations and satisfactions of research; the joys of having William Shawn tell her that the first draft of Silent Spring (which was serialized in the New Yorker) was "a brilliant achievement...full of beauty and loveliness and depth of feeling." Medical problems plagued both the Carson and Freeman families; Carson's later letters are riddled with one bit of bad news after the next, from rheumatoid arthritis to iriditis, to metastasized cancer. Yet her gradual decline is related so sparingly and with such mettle, it is overpowering. Darting, fresh, sensuous, pleasingly elliptical at times, these letters also serve to tether the increasingly deified Carson firmly to earth — just where she'd want to be.
Pub Date: March 20, 1995
ISBN: 0807070114
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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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