The rivers of mutual affection, admiration, and artistry form a powerful confluence in these deeply affecting exchanges.
A collection of revealing and moving letters, spanning nearly 40 years, between the celebrated playwright and his publisher and friend at New Directions.
Laughlin, a poet in his own right, emerges in these pages as an exemplar of a friend. Invariably supportive, encouraging, and compassionate, the publisher was steadfast in his belief in Williams’ work—not just plays, but also poems and short stories—and his deep affection for the man. The early letters here, the majority of which are from Williams when he was young and barely known, ripple with hope and ambition. Even as early as 1942, Laughlin was writing that a script was “extremely interesting and very beautiful in places.” This sort of language continued until Williams’ death in 1983. As his career began to skyrocket (with The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire), he showed his own loyalty to Laughlin and ND by having his work published entirely with them. Later, however, we read that ND did not really have an interest in Williams’ projected memoir. His letters—even the brief ones—often contain luminescent sentences and a refreshing wryness: “The evils of promiscuity are exaggerated,” he wrote in 1945. “Of course, the primary and ultimate object is to remain alive,” he said in 1971. Occasionally, Williams offers snarky comments—e.g., about Gore Vidal—and some harsh ones for various critics, including Paul Goodman and Robert Brustein. Throughout, both Williams and Laughlin emerge as avid readers and admirers of the work of other writers, including Paul Bowles and others. The text is gracefully edited and thoughtfully and unobtrusively annotated by Fox, former president and publisher of ND, Williams’ last editor, and Laughlin’s co–literary executor; and Keith, an acting teacher and consulting editor at ND. The editors inform us about the people in Williams’ life and the specifics of the Williams productions that the letters discuss: cast members, director, critical and popular responses, etc.
The rivers of mutual affection, admiration, and artistry form a powerful confluence in these deeply affecting exchanges.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-24620-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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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