An excellent piece of work, and an invaluable gloss on a body of fiction that looks more prescient, and important, as the...
Stone’s first nonfiction book is a memoir of the decade when he came of age and absorbed experiences transformed into such memorable novels as Dog Soldiers (1974), Outerbridge Reach (1992) and Bay of Souls (2003).
It’s primarily a tale of people encountered and places seen, beginning in 1958 when Stone was a naval officer aboard a cargo ship performing geophysical research in latitudes approaching Antarctica. Despite side trips to Australia and South Africa, he ruefully concedes, “I felt very worldly, but in fact my international sophistication was severely limited.” The persona thus established became a paradoxical survival skill, as Stone moved on to the first of two tours in New York City’s journalistic world, marriage and fatherhood during lean years spent in New Orleans, back to New York, then to California (on a Stegner Writing Fellowship)—and into several drug-fueled years lived under the inspiration of Kerouac and the Beats and the saturnine tutelage of novelist-“prankster” Ken Kesey. Stone was in fact a passenger on the bus “Further” during its infamous 1964 cross-country joyride. Later, there were voyages to Paris and London, gigs with popular magazines (notably Esquire), the successful publication of his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, and its unsuccessful filming spearheaded by Paul Newman, and a 1968 trip to Vietnam as a correspondent for the short-lived British publication INK. The author relates several interesting stories, including one about the Mexican misadventure that gives this book its arresting title. Stone’s descriptive and rhetorical intensity and versatility are strongly imprinted on every page, but the book is not self-serving: As hard as he is on America’s puritanical legalism and reckless international adventuring, Stone is even more bluntly candid about the residue of his own ingenuous friendships and wasted youth (“. . . in the end we allowed drugs to be turned into a weapon against everything we believed in”).
An excellent piece of work, and an invaluable gloss on a body of fiction that looks more prescient, and important, as the decades pass.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-019816-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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