As the finality of the title indicates, Simone de Beauvoir considers this the last volume of her autobiography, a summing-up. At the outset she promises to consider in terms of its "themes" a life which in the previous four volumes (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, Force of Circumstance, A Very Easy Death) she has related more in terms of its events. It is a promise she never fulfills. This book is a pleasant but somehow centerless compendium of odds and ends from the ten years since the publication of Force of Circumstance — new and continued friendships, deaths, dreams, fond gossip, books read, films and plays seen, works written (here explained and defended against critics), travels touristic and political, feminist and socialist ideas — prefaced by a more forceful but still unevenly interesting essay on the provocative question, "Why am I myself?". Her meditations on this subject consist of brief recapitulations of the stages of her life from the perspective of Sartrean psychology (the conflict between one's sense of subject and one's treatment by others as an object) and of the related question of free will: to what extent is a human being formed by circumstance — parents, social class, friendships, schooling — and to what extent did Beauvoir shape herself?. She traces with satisfaction the persistence from her youngest years of a stubborn will and an "eagerness for knowledge" that have guided her through circumstance; but she never really comes to terms with the question. There are flashes of intensity and wonder — especially in Beauvoir's account of her relationship with a young woman who is obviously an intellectual adopted daughter, perhaps because Sylvie gives Beauvoir the grasp of the future which old age by her own testimony lacks, and without which she has, alas, loosened her grip on the present.
Pub Date: Aug. 23, 1974
ISBN: 1569249814
Page Count: 476
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1974
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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