Deserves a place on the shelf next to such classics of uninhibited American introspection as On the Road and A Fan’s Notes.
An endlessly fascinating memoir by a profoundly courageous writer.
Novelist and cultural critic Elliott (My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up, 2006, etc.) has plumbed his difficult life for his novels and short stories. A runaway at age 13, following his mother’s death, he spent years in group homes around Chicago, engaging in petty crimes and developing addictions to heroin and other narcotics, rather than stay with his violence-prone sadistic father. As he began his latest book, Elliott was just resuming a daily regimen of Adderall ingestion. Off the drug, he lost the focus to write anything. Back on it and experimenting with means of enhancing its amphetamine-like effects, his mind still raced, but he was better able to channel his energies into writing down his rapid-fire thoughts. His new book, he decided, would be about a murder trial getting underway in San Francisco, where he had settled after a restless post-adolescence period. In the spring of 2007, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Hans Reiser was accused of killing his Russian-born wife Nina, whose body had yet to be found. The author's interest in the case was sparked by a confession of Reiser's best friend Sean Sturgeon, with whom Nina had an affair. The confession reminded Elliott of his father's odd story that he killed a man who had publicly humiliated him the year before Elliott was born. Despite the luridness of the subject matter, the author creates a refined, beautiful work of art. His themes—seemingly crime, murder, drugs and sadomasochistic sex—actually encapsulate the nature of truth, self, love and memory, and the limits of art to get at them all.
Deserves a place on the shelf next to such classics of uninhibited American introspection as On the Road and A Fan’s Notes.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-55597-538-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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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