This autobiography of Mlle. de Beauvoir up to the age of twenty-one is every bit as fascinating as a de Beauvoir novel, largely because she is as absorbed in herself here as a novelist is in his hero and in the same way. From her birth in 1908, through her childhood in a fairly well-to-do middle class family, through her adolescent insecurity, her loss of faith, the beginning of the drive for independence from her family, her decision to become a writer and a philosopher, her years at the Sorbonne, her discovery of the Cult of Restlessness with its consequences for her of loneliness, pride and dedication, to her final year of study, bringing her a sense of direction and purpose,— all is told with a drive and a feeling of personality that is most compelling. There are, in addition, good portraits of several members of her family, of her closest friend Zaza Mabille, of her cousin Jacques with whom she was in love, and of various fellow students at the Sorbonne including Jean-Paul Sartre. Though she passed through many stages that every sensitive and intelligent girl growing up experiences, most of it seems new because of her vitality and her intellectual curiosity. Her novelist's hand is most clearly seen in her self-editing— in spite of writing about herself in great detail, no incidents or people are presented for their own sakes alone but always as a means of furthering the book as a whole. It is a stimulating story of the birth of an existentialist and the coming of age of an extraordinary young woman. Highly recommended.
Pub Date: June 18, 1959
ISBN: 0060825197
Page Count: 386
Publisher: World
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1959
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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