Clapp, who was Bruce Chatwin's dedicated editor at the British publisher Jonathan Cape, offers a delightful remembrance of the celebrated travel writer and novelist, drawing on her own experiences and on those of his closest friends. Blond, bright-eyed, beautiful, and brilliant: Chatwin exuded a mystique (amplified by his own self-mythifying tales) that captivated almost everyone who met him—as well as those who only read his books. Even a Welsh barmaid, observing his ``theatrical way,'' said that if he ``had been born in the twelfth century, he would have been a wizard.'' Clapp wonderfully captures the ebullient conversationalist with an impeccable eye for works of art (in his 20s he was a rapidly rising star at Sotheby's) and a taste for immaculate spareness in his surroundings. Many of the facts here will be known to readers of Chatwin's books and collected essays, but Clapp adds much in the way of frank discussion of his bisexuality, along with the impenetrable mystery of his long marriage, and his sad deterioration and death from AIDS in 1989. Along the way, she charts his development as a writer, relating how she worked with him to carve out the slender, elegant In Patagonia from an unwieldy manuscript; how his novel On the Black Hill drew on experiences from his own childhood and on people and places he visited in Wales; how The Songlines finally freed him from his obsessive need to write about nomadism as the central human experience and allowed him to write his final work, Utz; and how that work showed a radical change in a man who had always shunned the accumulation of things and, facing death, became obsessed with the idea of collecting. (Not idealizing her subject, she also honestly analyzes the flaws she finds in his writings.) ``There was always a thin line between Bruce being brilliant and Bruce being batty,'' Clapp notes affectionately. This tribute captures both sides with grace and charm—a must-read for all his fans.
Pub Date: Aug. 7, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-41033-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
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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