Crisp portrait of the life and social environment of a principled, self-destructive, singular cultural figure.
Concise biography of Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), literary pioneer and luckless radical.
Royal Society of Arts fellow Cline (Zelda Fitzgerald, 2012, etc.) argues that despite his limited output, Hammett “transformed and subverted the detective novel form by his moral vision, propelling the mystery genre into literature.” Certainly, Hammett’s raucous life—bridging the hardscrabble, proletarian 19th century and the slick, unforgiving postwar era—taught him hard moral lessons that informed his fiction. His story is well-known, although Cline provides new insights via her interviews with Hammett’s daughter Jo. Following an apathetic youth, Hammett was thrust into manhood by service in World War I and early employment with the Pinkerton Detective Agency. These transformative experiences gave Hammett discipline and a fondness for masculine environments while sparking his complex relationship with money and the working class. Once he began placing stories in magazines like Black Mask, he became prolific, producing his five novels in a six-year period. Lean, intense books like The Maltese Falcon (1930) proved popular enough to fundamentally alter the American pop-culture vocabulary, just before the Depression. Hammett then veered away from his literary ambitions: He drank excessively for the next two decades, harming his already fragile health, tried his fortunes in Hollywood with diminishing returns and famously embarked upon a contentious yet mutually nurturing relationship with Lillian Hellman. Hammett volunteered for service in World War II yet was pursued by the FBI during the Red Scare of the 1950s, serving time in federal prison rather than testifying about his leftist connections. Although Cline discusses the plots and literary qualities of Hammett’s novels, she generally connects such elements back to the author’s increasingly complicated personal life and the tenor of his times, an approach which makes this brief biography seem efficiently rendered.
Crisp portrait of the life and social environment of a principled, self-destructive, singular cultural figure.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61145-784-1
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
