More an intellectual history than a biography, this sweeping study explores the life and times of the self-invented and self- destroyed wit, philosopher, and playwright Chamfort (1740-94), whose aphoristic style and enigmatic personality influenced, among others, Nietzsche and Camus. Born the illegitimate son of an aristocrat and a canon, Chamfort was raised by a grocer, his beauty, wit, and charm ingratiating him with an aristocracy insatiable for the sexual and verbal prowess he exhibited. At age 25, this lover who had been called a ``Herculean Adonis'' suffered a disfiguring disease and, in a period famous for its furniture, fashion, and conversation, became a writer, entering the petty intellectual wars among the now forgotten wits and scribblers competing for a place in the French Academy. Although supported by noble patronage, Chamfort was allied with no one, and embodied the contradictions of the age—reason and passion, irony and sentiment, elitism and egalitarianism, a love of both civilization and of solitude. In 1789, he began to negotiate the conflicting and changing ideologies of the Revolution, in which he believed intensely. By 1791, he renounced his comforts, titles, and prerogatives for an austere life as a ``citizen,'' and in 1792 he became director of the Bibliothäque nationale, which he turned into a repository of national treasures. The following year, caught in the vagaries of revolutionary leadership and ideology, he attempted suicide rather than be imprisoned for his defense of Charlotte Corday (assassin of Jean Paul Marat)—an act that left him alive but hideously mutilated. Chamfort died several months later, a ``cultural double agent'' as Arnaud (Art and History/Centre Pompidou, Paris) calls him: both participant and spectator, aristocrat and populist—but, above all, an enigma, a stranger, an ``exemplary case of illegitimacy.'' In his foreword, Joseph Epstein describes the peculiar conditions—sociological, psychological, philosophical, political- -that create the aphorist. In his careful analysis of every stage in Chamfort's metamorphosis and the worlds in which he lived, Arnaud re-creates those conditions and gives them credibility. (Fifteen halftones—not seen.)
Pub Date: May 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-226-02697-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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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