Well conceived but imperfectly executed, Cooper’s narrative suffers from the inevitable comparison to Twain’s own—but he is...
A serviceable travelogue of a circumnavigation in search of Samuel Clemens.
In the summer of 1895, desperately ill and nearly bankrupt after his publishing company failed, the 60-year-old writer Samuel Clemens, alias Mark Twain, decided to fall back on his storytelling skills and make a fortune anew by traveling around the world giving public readings. The lecture circuit was extremely lucrative in the 19th century, and Twain no doubt had the examples of Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde (who both reaped small fortunes off their reading tours) in mind. In the end, although it took a further toll on his health, it was a shrewd decision: not only did Twain gather material for several books and hundreds of newspaper articles while barnstorming across the South Pacific, Australia, India, and South Africa, but he also cemented his reputation as an international celebrity. An American journalist living in Jerusalem, Cooper had the happy notion of retracing Twain’s footsteps, an idea that suffers somewhat in the execution only because Twain’s accounts, often outrageously tongue in cheek, are so much livelier and better written than Cooper’s. The latter has an unfortunate habit of casting his narrative in the present tense—“We gaze at a log with the bones of victims stuffed into the crevices,” or “We return to the car and continue slowly along the secluded track”—and employing mawkish mood-setting devices better suited to a television travel documentary than to a prose work. In the main, however, he is a reliable and sympathetic narrator whose journey, although unremarkable on its own, provides a vehicle for uncovering lesser-known aspects of Twain’s life and work. If nothing else, readers may be inspired after reading Cooper to turn to Twain’s own writings on his voyage, especially Following the Equator, with its sharp observations on the world of a century ago.
Well conceived but imperfectly executed, Cooper’s narrative suffers from the inevitable comparison to Twain’s own—but he is well worth the cost of his passage all the same.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-55970-522-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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