A well-organized and sensitive portrait of a writer living to the fullest in his own time but always desirous of a “paradise...
A fresh biography of the great American writer.
Early on in this engaging portrait, Brown (History/Elizabethtown Coll.; Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing, 2009, etc.) draws our attention to two of Fitzgerald’s homes: an 1842 Greek Revival mansion alongside the Delaware River and a “rambling Victorian” north of Baltimore. For Brown, they personify a key theme in Fitzgerald’s life: a consistent yearning for America’s glorious past. Fitzgerald was a writer who beautifully captured his own time, the flapper-filled Jazz Age, while still being deeply influenced by his patrician father. Fitzgerald’s personal favorite, Tender Is the Night, with its aristocratic father, Dick Diver, “captures Fitzgerald’s historical vision more completely than anything else he ever wrote.” Brown draws extensively on the autobiographical aspects of Fitzgerald’s novels and stories. He also downplays Fitzgerald’s alcohol abuse. Despite being a lackluster student, he got into Princeton on sheer will power. He struggled there, too, but his close friendship with fellow student John Peale Bishop stimulated his love of literature and reading. After marrying Zelda Sayre, his work flourished. During the Depression, he published 65 stories in the Saturday Evening Post at $4,000 each. Shepherded by Maxwell Perkins, a young editor at Scribner, who would later become a close friend, confidant, and moneylender, Fitzgerald published This Side of Paradise closely followed by the “confessional” The Beautiful and the Damned. Brown suggests that The Great Gatsby was composed in the shadow of Joseph Conrad, and Tender Is the Night was his “masterwork.” Fitzgerald died in 1940 of a heart attack in the “hideous town” of Hollywood, still working. The Last Tycoon was published a year later.
A well-organized and sensitive portrait of a writer living to the fullest in his own time but always desirous of a “paradise lost.”Pub Date: May 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-674-50482-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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