A flawed portrait that won’t replace either Michael Patrick Hearn’s The Annotated Wizard of Oz (1976) or Katharine M....
An enthusiastic biography of the creator of Oz falls victim to questionable psychologizing and incomplete follow-through.
Lyman Frank Baum (1856–1919) was born near Syracuse, N.Y., in the middle of a diphtheria epidemic. Thus, argues British journalist Loncraine, a preoccupation with death hung over Baum’s childhood, compounded by the casualties of the Civil War. He nevertheless was a lively, entrepreneurial lad who wrote and printed amateur journals on a child’s printing press and later took on printing jobs for local businesses. Loncraine mines Baum’s youth for foreshadowing details—scarecrow nightmares, the yellow-hued Plank Road, a local balloonist’s antics. She also indulges in irresponsible speculation, mentioning that Baum’s father “may have” had the bodies of his four dead children disinterred and reburied. “If so, the process must have disinterred the infants in the family memory as well, and affirmed the ghostly presence of Baum’s shadow siblings.” Baum’s restlessness and enthusiasm took him through several endeavors—in the theater, as a shopkeeper, journalist and traveling salesman—and to the Dakota plains before he hit it big with children’s books after moving to Chicago. The narrative finally comes alive in the chronicle of his career, particularly the Oz books, which made him rich and then sustained him after he bankrupted himself trying to turn his creations into films (the crushing irony is gently noted). Having devoted nearly half of the book to the lead-up to his writing and particularly his purported preoccupation with child mortality, however, there is little payoff in the brief analyses of his prodigious output. Although Loncraine turns a few graceful phrases (“stories were a mixture of pure invention and ideas gathered from the cultural soup that sloshed around the author”), too often she resorts to clunky similes for effect: “He was cracking up, like a muddy hole covered in ice run over and shattered by a wagon wheel.”
A flawed portrait that won’t replace either Michael Patrick Hearn’s The Annotated Wizard of Oz (1976) or Katharine M. Rogers’s L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz (2002) as authoritative works of Baum scholarship.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-592-40449-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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