Although O’Neill claimed he was a “tragic optimist,” Dowling’s sympathetic, comprehensive portrait reveals a man beset by...
A portrait of a playwright inspired by suffering.
When Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) began writing plays in 1913, American theater featured hackneyed melodramas with audience-pleasing happy endings. O’Neill’s dark themes—oppression, racism, alienation—and innovative staging revolutionized the genre, paving the way for such later iconoclasts as Tennessee Williams and Thornton Wilder. In this authoritative biography, Dowling (English/Central Connecticut State Univ.; co-author, Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill, 2009, etc.) traces the trajectory of O’Neill’s career: his two semesters in George Baker’s noted playwriting seminar at Harvard; his professional growth with the Provincetown Players; the production of his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon (1920), which won a Pulitzer Prize; and his prolific output for the next two decades, including the Pulitzer-winning Anna Christie (1920) and Strange Interlude (1927) and ending with A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943) and the posthumous production of Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956). Critical acclaim did not assuage the demons that haunted O’Neill from childhood, however. Desperately lonely, “besieged by hideous attacks of rage, guilt, and fear,” he drank. “The stranglehold alcoholism had taken over O’Neill by the early twenties is nearly impossible to overstate,” Dowling writes. He felt spiritually and emotionally bereft. He was married three times, the last to the domineering Carlotta Monterey, who vowed to “construct a fortress around her husband” to protect him from annoyances, including his children from previous marriages. Both sons committed suicide. His daughter, Oona, who eloped with Charlie Chaplin when she was 18, also succumbed to alcoholism. O’Neill was stridently critical of America, calling it “the greatest failure….Its main idea is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of something outside of it….”
Although O’Neill claimed he was a “tragic optimist,” Dowling’s sympathetic, comprehensive portrait reveals a man beset by self-hatred and despair, struggling—and failing—to find salvation.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0300170337
Page Count: 584
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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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