British oral interviewer Parker (The Violence of Our Lives, 1995. etc.) pays tribute to the master of his craft: 84-year-old Louis ``Studs'' Terkel. Terkel, the radio legend of Chicago's WFMT and the author of more than a half dozen oral histories (including the Pulitzer Prizewinning ``The Good War,'' and, most recently, Coming of Age), cooperates with a biographer for the first time. Yet it might be more correct to call this work a portrait, because ``biography'' implies a narrative form that this artlessly arranged collection of interviews seldom possesses. Parker has rounded up 25 people who discuss Terkel, including American and English friends (such as John Kenneth Galbraith and longtime editor AndrÇ Schiffrin), WFMT associates, and his wife and son. Anecdotes offer a rough portrait of Terkel's life: New York City street kid, stage and TV actor, blacklist victim, jazz lover, devoted friend, social activist, author, ``radio raconteur'' (Terkel's words)—really, almost a force of nature. Indeed, Terkel's associates manifest such affection that their reminiscences blur into an unbroken series of hosannas to his virtue. Repeatedly, these people praise his unfeigned interest in his subjects, his great gift for putting radio guests at ease, and his unique ability to edit interviews into the seamless whole of a book. It is left to Terkel to be the most revealing about his life: the origin of his nickname, his rueful relationship with his mother and son (who lives under an assumed name to escape the long shadow of his father), his inability to say ``I love you,'' and his insecurity about his worth as a writer. We also receive a demonstration of his ability to listen and respond to guests through excerpts from interviews with Mahalia Jackson, Bertrand Russell, Zero Mostel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and others. Unfortunately, unlike his subject, Parker has not learned how to induce on-guard interviewees to open up in surprising, revealing, fresh ways. (Radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8050-3483-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
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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