During the winter of 1984-85, Taki, society columnist for the London Spectator, spent about ten weeks in an English prison for cocaine possession. Here is his reworked prison diary—a sometimes whiny, sometimes charming, always opinionated running commentary on his life, his friends, and his time behind bars. De Profundis this isn't—as Taki admits (``While I was in Pentonville, I was certain I would write a masterpiece once free. Needless to say, this was not happening''). But if, unlike Wilde, Taki fails to transform his suffering into high art, he does write about his experience with sufficient skill to render palpable his humiliations at the hands of brutal guards and fellow inmates; his sorrow at passing the Christmas season away from his family; and his rage when, still in the clink, he receives a letter from his wife announcing divorce. Of most interest here are the details of prison life—tedium, filth, fear, homosexuality—that Taki, pampered playboy scion of a Greek shipping fortune, observes with horrified wide eyes and reports with admirable honesty (``And speaking of sex, I found myself staring at a young inmate's legs this afternoon...''). Also noteworthy, at least as a society memoir, are the many passages Taki weaves in about his privileged earlier life, from dating royalty to gallivanting about with Sean Flynn to hosting Gianni Agnelli—although Taki, well known for his sharp pen, is as likely to mock as to celebrate the famous whose names he drops by the dozen (on Phil Donahue: ``an ignoramus without precedent''). Less worthy, however, though occasionally challenging, is Taki's incessant soapboxing, with diatribes aimed at, among others, pornographers, bratty tennis stars, feminists, and the Sixties. Digressive, self-indulgent, cranky—but Taki spins a spirited yarn and entertains even as he rankles.
Pub Date: June 14, 1991
ISBN: 0-87113-434-9
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1991
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
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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