Trenchant and dogged, expunging the biographer of a 20-year anxiety of influence.
Loquacious portraitist Lewis (The Real Life of Laurence Olivier, 1997, etc.) leaves no stone unturned in his obsessive and hardly sympathetic life of the tortured author of A Clockwork Orange.
Born in 1917 to a working-class Catholic family in northeast Manchester, John Wilson (his name until his first novel, Time for a Tiger, was published in 1956) lost his sister and mother early to the flu epidemic and grew into an unfeeling, massively egotistical bookworm. His early years as an English teacher married to an unstoppable Welsh dipsomaniac ended with his transformation into Anthony Burgess, pompous polymath of mock scholarship. His thousand-word-a-day writing quota ensued from the famously inaccurate 1959 diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumor; he churned out four novels during the one year he thought he had left and was preoccupied thereafter with afflictions of the body. Later remarried to an Italian countess, Burgess composed more than 30 titles before his death in 1993, ranging from early “jungle novels” about his travels and on to potboilers and copious literary criticism (Joyce, Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, and Shakespeare), as well as Broadway adaptations, screenplays (Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth), and translations. His lurid study of mechanized violence didn't take off until Stanley Kubrick’s chilling film version in 1971, and Lewis makes some mischievous revelations about A Clockwork Orange: Burgess lifted the idea from a French translation he had done years before, and the novel supposedly encrypts covert operations the author was allegedly engaged in with Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Aiming to situate Burgess in the grand scheme of English-language literary history, Lewis does so magisterially, especially in the chatty, page-long footnotes comparing him to heavyweight contemporaries Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, and Iris Murdoch, among others. Lewis can forgive his subject for preposterous subterfuges, but can’t rid himself of “discomfiture” over Burgess's extreme writerly froideur.
Trenchant and dogged, expunging the biographer of a 20-year anxiety of influence.Pub Date: March 19, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32251-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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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