A disappointing new biography of the nonpareil hardboiled writer. Alcoholic, fastidious, prickly, chivalrous, classically educated, Chandler was a bundle of contradictions. A legendary misogynist in fiction, he was devoted for most of his life to a much older wife. When she died, he obsessively sought solace in drink and the company of other women. He was also, on Hiney's showing, a man with a rare inaptness for comfort or self- satisfaction, a writer who found work painfully difficult yet became unmoored away from his desk, whose success as a screenwriter never mitigated his contempt for Hollywood, and a man to whom both reclusiveness (he wrote the first four Philip Marlowe novels in isolation from anyone but his beloved wife, Cissy) and socialization (his final year was punctuated by so many marriage proposals that two of his aspiring fiancÇes ended up in court over his will) were equally necessary and equally impossible. Readers who know Frank MacShane's 1976 biography of Chandler will be familiar with these matters. What London journalist Hiney adds is a new look at the Chandler archives and new interviews with the friends of his declining years; what's missing is any forceful new assessment of Chandler's personality and achievement as a writer. Hiney's inexperience as a biographer shows in his lack of confidence in his generalizations about Chandler's alcoholism, his early critical reception (though Chandler scorned highbrow intellectuals, they were faster to appreciate his work than mainstream reviewers), and his still- debated status in American letters. On Chandler's troubled personal life, Hiney admits that ``Cissy remains almost as much of an enigma now'' as when she and Chandler married, and ventures the conclusion, on slender grounds, that ``Chandler was, I am sure, a good man and an honest one.'' Hiney ends up nibbling around the edges of Chandler's life and work, as if he'd bitten off more than he could chew. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-87113-690-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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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