Readers shouldn’t be blamed for feeling misled and slightly cheated by a book marketed as a Spalding Gray title, when only a...
The late monologist's last work, heavily reliant on eulogies delivered by friends and family at two memorial services conducted after his 2004 suicide.
“Unfinished” may be the key word to describe both Gray's life and this book. Gray committed suicide at age 62 by leaping off the Staten Island Ferry into frigid New York Harbor. But that was just the last of many suicide attempts after a terrible car accident in Ireland in June 2001 left his body and spirit broken. In the title 40-page essay, Gray recounts with typical mordancy the accident and his subsequent hospitalizations in both Ireland and New York. The volume also includes a 10-page essay written on the tenth anniversary of his first meeting his wife, Kathy Russo. The majority of the book consists of recollections and tributes delivered at two separate memorial services—one at Lincoln Center, the other in his hometown of Sag Harbor, N.Y. Those paying tribute included his widow, his older brother, Rockwell Gray and fellow performers Eric Bogosian, Laurie Anderson and Eric Stoltz. Some of those are moving and revelatory. Others are less so, at times bordering on the platitudinous. Particularly touching are the recollections of Gray’s teenaged stepdaughter Marissa, describing her struggle to live with the suicidal, broken man her father became after the car accident. Another comes from fellow author Roger Rosenblatt, who noted of Gray: “No one ever could be so sublimely miserable.” The portrait of Gray that emerges is one of an adventurous, open-hearted, troubled soul who spent his life searching for “the perfect moment.” This, he apparently never found. But this book makes us miss his easy-going wit, already preserved in previous personal essays like “Swimming to Cambodia.”
Readers shouldn’t be blamed for feeling misled and slightly cheated by a book marketed as a Spalding Gray title, when only a fraction consists of his own words.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4861-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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
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