A compelling account, suffused with both sympathy and sharpness, of a writer who’s mostly forgotten and of a grandson who’s...
A grandson of writer MacKinlay Kantor (1904-1977) unravels the tangles of his grandfather’s life and finds many of those same threads (the good, the bad, the ugly) in his own life.
Shroder—himself a veteran writer (Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal, 2014, etc.) and journalist (editor of the Washington Post Magazine)—remembers his once-celebrated grandfather well, though Kantor had tumbled from the literary mountain by that time. Kantor’s novel Andersonville (1955) won the Pulitzer Prize, had been an enormous bestseller, but he never again produced something so well received by critics and consumers. His wealth flew from his hands like chaff. Shroder was an incredibly fortunate researcher: the Library of Congress holds 158 boxes of Kantor material, and Shroder found other caches, as well, including in his own home. Carefully sifting through all of this, and reading (and in some cases rereading) his grandfather’s work, the author began to see numerous parallels in their lives, from a passion for the Civil War to their submission to the disciplines of writing. Shroder is stunned by some of his discoveries (among them: his grandfather’s serial adultery), is somewhat surprised by Kantor’s turn to the political right (he was friends with Curtis LeMay), and is touched by Kantor’s enduring belief in his abilities despite reviewers’ harshness and slumping sales. The connections the author sees between the two of them sometimes seem a bit forced or obvious—writers do share some things, whether blood relatives or not. But the more Shroder finds out about his grandfather, the more his sympathy grows—Kantor’s own father was a con man of the first order—and he ends with a deeply felt appreciation. The author also notes that Kantor’s wife tolerated a lot—and lovingly so.
A compelling account, suffused with both sympathy and sharpness, of a writer who’s mostly forgotten and of a grandson who’s grateful.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-17459-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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