Mourning may become Electra, but it served equally well for O’Neill, who, as Black (English/Simon Fraser Univ.) contends in this massive biography, worked through his personal tragedies by recasting them for the stage. Beginning before O’Neill’s birth, Black adumbrates the troubles of the young marrieds who brought the playwright into this harsh world and then delineates the misfortunes which struck O’Neill at an early age. After he survived the problems of a morphine-addicted mother and schoolyard politics, the adversities of childhood gave way to traumas of adulthood. Death overshadowed O’Neill’s life: Within a period of six years, he witnessed the death of five friends (three of whom committed suicide). Within three years of his first Broadway success, O’Neill’s entire family—mother Ella, father James, and brother Jamie—died. A scandalous divorce and subsequent remarriage offered little respite from his turbulent life and times, and physical affliction in the form of muscle tremors tormented him in later life. Through subtle readings of O’Neill’s plays and extensive research into his life and letters, Black explores how these monstrous losses ravaged O’Neill’s psyche and how the playwright’s mourning perversely inspired his creative processes. Black’s structure sometimes groans even more loudly than his hero, as diagnoses are swept in to stand alone rather than woven into the thread of the narrative, and pedantic explanations of such common terms as “separation anxiety,— better buried in footnotes, disrupt the biographical flow. Despite such minor flaws, however, the writing at its best is as straightforward as it is informative, presenting O—Neill’s sadly heroic tale with welcome grace. Though completing this massive tome may require several long days’ journeys into night at the library, the destination is more than adequate recompense. O’Neill proves a fascinating, if morbid, traveling companion, and Black a capable and erudite cicerone. (40 illus.)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-300-07676-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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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