In time for the centenary of Stevenson's death, this weighty biography ballasts the romantic version of his life, from his wild youth in Edinburgh to his exile in Samoa, with an integrated appreciation of Scotland's best writer. Historian and biographer McLynn (Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa, 1993, etc.) is a good match for Stevenson and a doughty partisan for his literary worth, which suffered posthumously from both the hagiography encouraged by his wife, Fanny, and from subsequent Bloomsbury debunking. Now, with later champions like Borges and Nabokov and recently renewed biographical interest, Stevenson can no longer be dismissed as a children's author with adult crossover appeal or a dilettante with a Byronic talent for living more interestingly than he wrote. McLynn balances a historian's thorough research with well-chosen excerpts from Stevenson's letters, essays, and verse, whose grace makes an unflattering contrast with the biography's tone-deaf prose. McLynn intimately depicts Stevenson's sickly childhood in Edinburgh (particularly the Calvinist nurse who had an acknowledged effect on his imagination), bohemian university days, early literary career, and later travels. The writer's life took an unlooked-for turn when he met Fanny Osbourne, a married American with a frontier temperament, misplaced artistic aspirations, and neurotic possessiveness-or at least that was the opinion of his friends, particularly editor and poet W.E. Henley, who famously fell out with Stevenson after he set out for Samoa to improve his health. In the Pacific Stevenson outdid Melville, at least with the Samoans, who accorded him heroic status. The book is marred toward the end by McLynn's undisguised antipathy for Fanny and her clan, whose demands are blamed for Stevenson's stroke and the lower quality of his South Seas writings. (For The Collected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, see p. 1347.) Nonetheless, Stevenson's charm is visible in every letter and essay quoted in this noteworthy biography. (16 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41284-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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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