A missed opportunity to put one of America’s truly unique writers in a larger historical context.
A British scholar unearths the roots of one of the 20th century’s most brash and colorful writers and public figures.
Blame Tom Wolfe and that damn bus. Due to the image of novelist Ken Kesey (1935–2001), popularized in the pages of Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the writer has been nearly doomed to historical obscurity as the drug-addled leader of the Merry Pranksters. In fact, Kesey was a brilliant, sensitive and ambitious creator, as interested in the act of performance as he was in the accolades of critical success. In this slim biography, Dodgson (History/Lakeland Coll.) examines how Kesey’s early influences, his contemporaries and the times he was born into all shaped his evolution from literary lion to ringleader of the countercultural circus. Dodgson first met Kesey in 1999, shortly before the author’s untimely death. While the young scholar is careful not to imply a true friendship with the author, he displays an obvious giddiness at meeting the icon; Dodgson seems more in awe at Kesey’s collection of artifacts than in the man himself. The author provides a fairly straightforward examination of Kesey’s early life and works, with special attention paid to the bohemian scene around Perry Lane near Stanford University and the development of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion. Dodgson does turn up a few unexpected gems from a largely unreported era of Kesey’s life, including anecdotes about fellow travelers like Neal Cassady and Ken Babbs. But, much like the collective hangover left over from the 1960s, the book also suffers from the same revisionist romanticism that dogged Kesey’s remaining decades. “Theirs was not a revolution of guns and glory,” Dodgson writes. “It was a new type of revolution: one of morals, of manners, and of the mind.” Heavy, man.
A missed opportunity to put one of America’s truly unique writers in a larger historical context.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-299-29510-3
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
