Not much here that hasn’t been exhaustively discussed in Norman Sherry’s three-volume The Life of Graham Greene (1989, 1995,...
Misty remembrances by Greene’s late-life French mistress reveal intimate moments but few state secrets.
Cloetta was interviewed shortly before her death in 2001 by French journalist Allain, whose parents were friends of Greene’s. (The mysterious 1960 assassination in Morocco of the interviewer’s father, Resistance hero Yves Allain, provides a shadowy subtext here.) Cloetta recalls first meeting the famous English author in 1959, when she was living in Douala, Cameroon, with her importer husband and two teenaged daughters. Diminutive, boyish and intelligent, 36-year-old Cloetta was apparently in the process of separation (though she never actually divorced), while Greene, at 55, had not quite extricated himself from his relationship with Catherine Walston. Nonetheless, after he moved permanently to Antibes in the mid-1960s the lovers allowed themselves to be “carried away by passion,” as Cloetta describes it to Allain. The interviewer asks some barbed questions: Did the reluctant Cloetta ever wonder, after being lured by Greene to a Paris brothel for an evening of fun, what kind of “very strange character” she was getting involved with? “My whole life has been a secret,” Cloetta provocatively asserts; appropriately, her answers are elusive. Allain can’t even get Cloetta to admit that Greene was playing a double game with his good friend, English spy turned Soviet defector Kim Philby. She acknowledges only that “to the very end, he worked with the British Services.” Cloetta’s portrait of her lover is touching and convincing. It also confirms his “passion for secrecy”: the doubts, suspicions and aspersions cast since Greene’s death in 1991 won’t likely ever be cleared.
Not much here that hasn’t been exhaustively discussed in Norman Sherry’s three-volume The Life of Graham Greene (1989, 1995, 2004)—or, for that matter, in Allain’s own The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene (1983).Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7475-7108-2
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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