This hefty volume of writings by one of the original Beyond the Fringe members reveals the contours and continuities in Bennett's seemingly haphazard subsequent career as a playwright and screenwriter (most recently for The Madness of King George). These talks, diaries, book reviews, and bagatelles were written mostly for the London Review of Books, a venue amenable to the self-proclaimed ``soft centrist'' writer, whose compassion and intelligence come through vividly in this wonderful collection. In autobiographical essays, the butcher's son from Leeds neither wallows in his working-class roots nor discards them wholesale at the altar of high culture. A number of memoirs here record his uneasy entrance into the academic and cultural worlds, where he has always felt a bit awkward and embarrassed. He fondly eulogizes TV performer Russell Harty and his producer at the BBC, Innes Lloyd. His diaries of working on his plays, Forty Years On most prominent among them, include great theatrical anecdotes, especially about John Gielgud. Bennett's fondness for neurotic Czech Franz Kafka and grumpy librarian Philip Larkin leads to a number of essays and reviews. The lengthy selections from Bennett's diaries, mostly from the '80s, give vent to his distaste for Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch; chronicle a writer's conference in Moscow, a mugging in NYC, and his endless arguments with himself. The longest batch of entries tell the amazing story of a slightly deranged old woman who lived in a van in Bennett's driveway for 15 years. Fascinated by the sex lives of others, Bennett is coy about his own, relying on a faux sense of decorum that's much like his affected philistinism. Some satirical bits remind us most enjoyably of Bennett's skills as a writer for stage, TV, and the big screen. Chatty, modest, and always entertaining. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-44489-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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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