Styron tells of his descent into clinical depression, later hospitalization, and recovery. Much of this slim (96-page) work appeared last year in Vanity Fair magazine. In 1984, Styron's 30 years of alcohol and more recent excessive tranquilizer intake (Halcion) combined to make alcohol poisonous to his system and deprived him totally of his friendly balm, the alcohol that he says allowed him to open up his works as a clear mind never could (he adds that he never wrote while drinking). Shortly thereafter, he went into depression, which he thinks may or may not have been tied in with going cold turkey off booze. He puts forth various genetic hints (his father had "battled the gorgon for much of his lifetime") and suggests buried childhood events to explain the origins of his illness. His depression would sweep over him late in the day, just at the time of the afternoon nap he could no longer achieve and apparently just before the hour of the first drink that he could no longer have. The depths of his depression carried him far beyond alcohol withdrawal and pill poisoning, Styron says. In general, the tour of the depression he renders is gripping, though simply as writing it could have done with more intense immediacy and searing detail. It's best when dramatizing a deepening stage in the illness, and it comes to a high point when Styron decides to kill himself and throws his private diary into the garbage. By then we are convinced that his illness is as he says, "so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression." Only various lines from Dante, he thinks, come near to showing his experience. He admires his wile Rose for standing by him at his most obliterated, and we get a sense of uplift when his hospitalization and new drug begin to take hold. His scathing review of antidepressants seems just. Each victim of depression is unique, and we feel that Styron has shown us—in large strokes without getting as razor-edged as Robert Lowell—as much of his black pit as he can bear to show.
Pub Date: Sept. 4, 1990
ISBN: 0679643524
Page Count: 84
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1990
BOOK REVIEW
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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