The third and final volume of Graves’s life of his uncle (begun with Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1986) completes the full, febrile metamorphosis of Robert Graves into a romantic, “muse-inspired” poet. This volume opens just after the tumultuous collapse of Graves’s stormy 14-year relationship with the American poet Laura Riding. Although Riding had guided and inspired some of Graves’s best work—including his WWI autobiography, Goodbye to All That, and his historical novel, I Claudius’she now scorned him and his work bitterly. Since Graves had always worked best when in love, it wasn—t long before he tried to salve his wounds with another young woman—the long- suffering Beryl Hodge. Although it would be almost another decade before Graves divorced his first wife, Nancy, he and Beryl soon settled down to domestic life. During the war, between minor novels, criticism, and scattered poetry, Graves wrote The White Goddess. This long, fiendishly involuted descant on the poet’s wells of inspiration, full of gnomic musings on trees and goddesses, managed to create for Graves a cult following that lingers to this day. After the war, on his beloved Majorca, Graves acted out his theories by ignoring Beryl and falling in love with a succession of beautiful young women, imbuing these —muses— with the mystical, hortatory powers of the Great White Goddess. These muses usually repaid his obsessive attention with distance and spite, spurring him on to even greater poetic effusions. The wonder of it is that from these silly, self-involved infatuations came some of the best love poetry of the late 20th century. If this biography has any flaws, they are its stupefying length and perhaps its overly narrow focus: The spotlight on Graves is so bright that it’s sometimes difficult to fully appreciate the important supporting players. But these are quibbles. Richard Graves has created a monument to a monument.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-75380-116-7
Page Count: 618
Publisher: Collins & Brown/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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
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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