A concise, useful examination of a novel that, at its heart, is a “wise and merciful book” about the love of teaching.
Literary criticism/memoir regarding an overlooked American novel.
In the latest volume in the publisher’s Bookmarked series, Almond (Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country, 2018, etc.) delivers an energetic discussion of Stoner, the 1965 novel by John Williams (1922-1994), who won a National Book Award for Augustus (1972). The Bookmarked series encourages authors to personally engage with the works they are championing, and Almond delves into personal failures and accomplishments as well as relationships with family, friends, and students, all through the prism of Stoner. Though some readers may find this approach disruptive, it results in a sensitive and perceptive reading of a novel Almond first read when he was a struggling 28-year-old writer. He has since read it innumerable times, each time learning more about the novel and himself. Stoner, which has been reissued a few times, is a quiet, reflective tale that recounts the life of a rural farm boy who becomes an English professor, husband, and father. Almond offers this “peculiar pint-sized ode” to a novel that has become for him a manual for “living.” A “literary novel” that is also “subversive,” Stoner “casts a piercing light upon the worship of power and wealth that has corroded our national spirit.” Almond loves how it “captures with unbearable fidelity the moments of internal tumult that mark every human life.” At times, he gets “furious” with William Stoner the “perfect martyr,” the “hardcore masochist.” He discusses the novel’s “unrelieved narration,” or “plain style,” as Williams described it, and its portrayal of a wrecked marriage, the nasty world of academic in-fighting, and the challenges of child-rearing. Almond argues that Stoner is both an anti-war novel and, with its detailed portrait of the “collision of poverty and privilege,” a “radical social novel.”
A concise, useful examination of a novel that, at its heart, is a “wise and merciful book” about the love of teaching.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63246-087-5
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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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