A finely textured portrait of an acclaimed poet.
How her life informed the beloved poetry of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979).
Travisano (Emeritus, English/Hartwick Coll.; Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic, 1999, etc.), founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, draws judiciously on Bishop’s poems, prose, and letters—including those to her psychoanalyst, many lovers, and close friends—to create an authoritative and sensitive biography. Bishop carried lifelong scars from a difficult childhood: Her father died when she was an infant; her mother was sequestered in a mental institution from the time Elizabeth was 5. Passed among relatives in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts, Bishop was told nothing about her mother—and never saw her again. Besides abiding loneliness and feelings of abandonment, Bishop suffered from asthma and bouts of eczema. In adulthood, she also succumbed to autoimmune disorders; depression, made worse by cortisone prescribed for her asthma; and alcoholism. Travisano suggests that heredity may have played a part in Bishop’s alcohol abuse, which sometimes occurred for no apparent reason. Often, she became a binge drinker in response to emotional distress. Since she repeatedly attached herself to women who were possessive, headstrong, or mentally unstable, her love affairs could be volatile. Travisano finds sources of Bishop’s poetry in those difficult relationships and in enduring wounds as well as in various settings of her peripatetic life: among them, New York, where Marianne Moore became a mentor to whom, for several years, she would submit poems for approval; Key West, where Hemingway’s ex-wife Pauline Pfeiffer became a close friend; Brazil, where Bishop lived for nearly two decades with the wealthy journalist and arts patron Lota de Macedo Soares; San Francisco; Seattle; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Maine. Although not groundbreaking, Travisano’s sympathetic perspective, thorough research, and perceptive close readings lucidly portray the complexities of a writer noted for her “reserve, calm, meticulous accuracy, and humorous detachment.”
A finely textured portrait of an acclaimed poet.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-42881-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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