Meets the very high standard set by Alfred Kazin’s Starting Out in the Thirties for describing a young man’s intellectual...
Noted editor Solotaroff picks up where Truth Comes in Blows (1998) left off, describing with compassionate acuity the difficult early adult years that led to his vocation as a literary journalist.
He begins in the summer of 1948, when the 19-year-old Navy veteran meets Lynn Ringler, “a glowing girl with a sexy-arty look and a brooding inner life.” Their romance is bumpy during his first two years as an undergraduate at Ann Arbor, and even after they marry, in 1950, she’s prone to severe depression, not helped by their bumpy sex life and Solotaroff’s uncertainty about whether he should commit himself to fiction (at which several friends tell him he’s not so hot) or a scholarly career, for which he is better suited but unenthusiastic. Two sons, his graduate work at the University of Chicago, and extreme poverty further strain their relationship, which Solotaroff analyzes candidly and, insofar as an outsider can judge, fairly. He writes with equal vividness and perception about mid-20th-century academic stars (Morton Dauwen Zabel, Leslie Fiedler) and ordinary folks (an East Chicago working-class student provides the most moving scene). The best portions here, though, delineate the author’s struggle to reconcile his need to make a living, which a university professorship can provide, with his love for the exciting new literature being published by writers like Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and grad-school pal Philip Roth. Their work demonstrates that the ethnic origins Solotaroff shares could be the stuff of great fiction, though he is increasingly aware he will not be the one writing it. Then an essay on Roth leads to an article about Jewish-American writers in The Times Literary Supplement and lunch in New York with Norman Podhoretz, who offers him a job as associate editor at Commentary. The die is cast, but his marriage survives only two more years.
Meets the very high standard set by Alfred Kazin’s Starting Out in the Thirties for describing a young man’s intellectual coming-of-age with nuanced honesty and genuine emotion. Let’s hope Solotaroff doesn’t take five more years to get to New American Review.Pub Date: June 26, 2003
ISBN: 1-58322-582-X
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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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