Veteran literary critic Booth (Univ. of Chicago; The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, 1988) offers a heartfelt, though somewhat scattered, assertion of the value of avocation. With detailed (sometimes overly detailed) examinations of the many ways that his devotion to chamber music has affected his life and worldview, Booth, who started his lifelong study of the cello in 1952 at the age of 31 (after earlier dalliances with clarinet, piano, and voice), makes a convincing argument for the spiritual, physical, and social benefits of “amateuring.” The book, an amalgam of ruminations, journal entries, and polemics on and around the topic of why “the amateur chooses, day by day, hour by hour, to pursue what life does not require,” is in many ways a paean to the composers (most particularly Beethoven) whose music the author adores and to the teachers and fellow amateurs (most particularly his wife, a talented violinist) who have shared with him the pain and joy of this devotion. Booth sometimes veers into a fussy, dogmatic tone—on familiar subjects like the evils of passive hobbies or the failure of the school systems to provide a decent musical education—which may make readers impatient for the return of his more starry-eyed, crazy-for-the-cello narrative. For the Love of It would benefit from an accompanying soundtrack; it illustrates a bit too perfectly the dichotomy between rhetoric and music, since often the long passages that attempt to describe the rapture of a specific opus fall short of success. Yet Booth’s struggle—both musical and authorial—is so admirable, and his joy in learning so tangible, that many readers will be tempted, as he hopes, “to stop reading and get working on [their] own amateur pursuit.” An inspiring exhortation to those who have yet to find passion in pastime. (7 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-226-06585-5
Page Count: 217
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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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