A collection of slyly humorous essays—more personal than political—about the evolution of a critic who will stop at nothing to pursue her chosen mÇtier. Lesser, founder and editor of the Threepenny Review and author of four previous books (A Director Calls: Stephen Daltry and the Theater, 1997, etc.), has decided now to reflect on her growth as a writer, intellectual, and obsessive connoisseur of the arts. In so doing, she reveals much about herself and her approach: Lesser seems to take in as much as she can, in as many different forms as possible, from literature and theater to dance and opera. In that respect, she’s truly “an eighteenth-century man of letters, though one who happens to be female and lives in twentieth-century Berkeley.” That self-description conveys something of the humanism of her critical perspective, though it doesn’t reveal much about the attendant personal journey required. Fortunately, Lesser fills in the gaps. Her essays address her formation at Harvard, Cambridge University, and the University of California, Berkeley, as well as her determined (and occasionally hysterical) journalistic pursuit of interview subjects. All of her pieces, even those with little bearing on literature, make for distracting reading: Lesser’s keen wit doesn’t shy from self-ridicule. Anyone who has spent too much time in academia, struggling to reconcile its internecine power struggles with their own idealism, may risk side ache here from too much laughter. Which isn—t to say that she means merely to entertain. Instead, Lesser also spends considerable time reflecting on the artists whose work has galvanized her, including choreographer Mark Morris and poet Thom Gunn. Although she doesn’t have the zaniness of, say, Beryl Bainbridge, Lesser does cast herself as a character in her own work, thereby making the life of a critic seem both nutty and joyous.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40402-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
