A fine job: May’s attentions may well inspire new interest in Grey’s largely forgotten work.
A well-crafted biography of the western writer.
Grey (1872–1939) made his considerable fortune on sturdy tales of the Wild West, tales with an uncomplicated vision of right and wrong, truth and falsehood. Continuing the study he began with Zane Grey (1997), literary scholar May reveals that Grey’s own life was considerably more tangled. From the Mormons (whom he portrayed as villains in Riders of the Purple Sage), he acquired a hankering to take up polygamy—a notion that his ever-tolerant wife Dolly finally quashed. From tales of boyhood heroes, like Daniel Boone, he nurtured a profound wanderlust, and he was given to leaving Dolly to manage his business affairs while he wandered off to sail the South Seas or fish the streams of Alaska—and spending so much on his adventures that he came close to bankruptcy more than once. More positively, writes May, Grey was an outdoorsman and athlete par excellence, a “freshwater fisherman, baseball pitcher, explorer, nature lover, sailor, adventurer, [and] saltwater angler,” to say nothing of an extraordinarily prolific and competent writer. For many years, like his hero Theodore Roosevelt, he filled the role of the macho man of letters, a role that would be usurped by Grey’s later contemporary Ernest Hemingway. (Hemingway, the author reveals, rebuffed Grey’s repeated invitations to go deep-sea fishing, fearing “that Grey might take the opportunity to cash in on Hemingway’s popularity.”) Though he is best known for his Western novels, May suggests that Grey deserves critical recognition as an outstanding interpreter of the outdoors and as something of a proto-environmentalist, instead of being shelved as a minor genre writer. His argument in this regard is entirely convincing, backed with ample quotations from Grey’s published writings and unpublished journals.
A fine job: May’s attentions may well inspire new interest in Grey’s largely forgotten work.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8214-1316-3
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Ohio Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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