One of the weirder eyewitness accounts, but an invaluable record for literary scholars.
Papa’s late-life amanuensis, who after his death married his troubled youngest son, looks back more than 40 years to record frankly and without axes to grind the antics of a larger-than-life and truly bizarre clan.
Born Valerie Danby-Smith in 1940 in Dublin, the author interviewed Ernest Hemingway for the Irish Times in mid-1959 and was swiftly incorporated into the cuadrilla of hangers-on keeping him company that summer in Madrid. Valerie, fresh out of an Irish convent school, was eager to become a journalist; she was also cheerful, liked bullfights, and could drink heartily. Hemingway seems to have regarded her as the daughter he always hoped to have, not to mention a much-needed foil against his bossy fourth wife, Mary. Aged 60 and beginning to falter in health, Ernest relied increasingly on Valerie, hired her as his secretary, and lured her to his Cuban estate, Finca Vigía, where he was attempting to finish the manuscripts that became The Dangerous Summer and A Moveable Feast. The Cuban revolution eventually forced the Hemingways back to the US, despite Mary's calculated invitation of Castro to the finca (one of the author’s best descriptive passages), and Valerie saw them only intermittently after that. But those crucial months provided her with a glorious literary education and encounters many famous folks who later opened doors for her in New York, where she helped Mary sift through papers and manuscripts after Ernest committed suicide in 1961. The memoir grows almost surreal with Valerie’s marriage to Gregory. Vilified by Ernest for such early displays of unmanliness as stealing his mother’s hosiery, Greg finally confessed to his wife that he was a cross-dresser and later underwent a disastrous sex-change operation. (She calls their sex life “perfectly normal” and says he was a devoted father to their three children.) The author maintains throughout a remarkable, cold-eyed candor, though her portrait of filial friendship with Ernest is touching and humorous.
One of the weirder eyewitness accounts, but an invaluable record for literary scholars.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46733-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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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