Self-loathing may or may not be the meaning between-the-lines of Sartre's writings; narcissism, however, seems the very crystallization of Simone de Beauvoir's. It's a peculiar sort of narcissism , the narcissism of the femme savante, usually referred to (by the one who possesses it) as unremitting honesty: the confessional of the intellectual, or a look in the mirror, without makeup, under the harshest light. It's other things, too: for instance, Camus'— "The sore that is scratched with such concern finally becomes a source of pleasure"—but then de Beauvoir doesn't like Camus.... This is the final volume of her autobiographical trilogy. The first explored her bourgeois rebellion; the second, the university years, the early Sartre relationship, the War; now, the past decades, from the Liberation to the present. It concludes a major work, major in that it gives us both a representative existentialist sensibility, and a behind-the-scenes picture of an age. Typically, the style's uneven; the thinking (especially the jumbled versions of certain aspects of Sartre's philosophy) embarrassing; and the disclosures about herself or other equally famous figures (poor Koestler....) rather antipathetic, self-regarding, one-sided. Everything has a tendency to slip out of gear: at one stretch the tempo is slipshod, then funereal; the tone ranges from the crisp to the lyrical, from the weary to the carping. Like Sartre, she came to political consciousness somewhat late in life; like him, she has certainly made up for it. History is Big Sister here, permeating all reactions: the revolving door maneuvers with the Communists, the positions taken vis-a-vis Korea, Algeria, Cuba, even her affaires de coeur. Indeed, how she reconciles ideological determinism with personal freedom (the book's truest touches, incidentally, concern drugs, compulsion- neuroses, thanatophobia) is certainly a triumph of sorts: one of the most significant solipsistic acts of the century. It is also a story which in its determined self-exposure has fascinated many and will continue to do so again.
Pub Date: June 15, 1965
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1965
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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