A master class on the pleasures of the English language well-wrought—a useful complement to his guide on writing literary...
Esteemed essayist and poet Lopate (At the End of the Day: Selected Poems and an Introductory Essay, 2010, etc.) offers “a motley collection of essays, personal and critical,” loosely tied together around the theme of “the discovery of limitations, and learning to live with them.”
The author divides the essays into sections devoted to family, daily life, city spaces and literary concerns. Yet there is a single “sensibility flowing through disparate subject matters,” that of the good-humored cynic and gentle contrarian. In the first essay, the simple event of Lopate’s daughter losing a balloon presents evidence that life is, in the end, “loss, futility, and ineluctable sorrow.” In another essay, the author concludes that being a baseball fan “means learning to absorb failure and be on a friendly footing with defeat.” And so it goes through essays on sex, marriage, film, writing, politics, the Bible and more. Lopate leaves behind at times the purely personal with telling essays on film and literature. He moves from revisiting Ginsberg’s Howl to thoughts on a wide variety of writers, including Charles Reznikoff, Leonard Michaels, Stendhal and others. No matter the topic, however, another constant throughout is fine writing; the words Lopate chooses are the only words that will do. “The interruptive nocturne of clinics” perfectly captures nights on the pediatric ward where his daughter spent so much of her infancy. Brooklyn, he muses in a paean to his beloved hometown, has “a touch of the amateur, voluntary, homemade about the place.” In a concluding essay, Lopate confesses that writing is his life. Readers are well-rewarded for his obsession.
A master class on the pleasures of the English language well-wrought—a useful complement to his guide on writing literary nonfiction, To Show and to Tell, which will publish simultaneously.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9586-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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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