At least the supremely self-obsessed and hateful Horsley has the good manners not to leave readers on a note of false...
A guide to supremely selfish hedonism.
Born into a British family of lazy wealth and contemptuous privilege, Horsley had little use when growing up for, well, anything. His father, a millionaire businessman and paraplegic, never realized just how wonderful a boy Sebastian was. His mother, a dark empress of well-announced and dramatically failed suicide attempts, is charitably described by her son as “about as useful as a nun’s tit.” So Horsley’s life began in a state of decrepit aristocracy so Grand Guignol it was only a couple of murders and an incestuous romance away from a V.C. Andrews novel. He dawdled through an expensive education, wasted on someone more interested in imitating idols like Marc Bolan and Johnny Rotten. A few failed bands and a serious drug habit later, he fell in with Jimmy Boyle, a cheerfully psychopathic Scottish murderer who thoroughly charmed the Guardian-reading intelligentsia with his tale of supposed personal reform. While ostensibly running a criminal-rehab organization with Boyle, Horsley indulged in some serious self-destruction, including a stint as one of Boyle’s many not-so-willing sexual partners. He wasn’t having much luck figuring out what to do with his life, which he describes here in a seemingly inexhaustible flow of knotty, bitter one-liners, doled out every several paragraphs. (“Dandyism is a lie which reveals the truth and the truth is that we are what we pretend to be.”) He finally bottomed out in the last, worst resort of the work-averse narcissist: performance art.
At least the supremely self-obsessed and hateful Horsley has the good manners not to leave readers on a note of false uplift. This is one dandy who will go sneering into the grave, bitching from beyond about the quality of guests at the funeral service.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-146125-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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
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
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