Essential reading about a writer whose major novels continue to command attention.
How do you top Catch-22? Daugherty (English and Creative Writing/Oregon State Univ.; One Day the Wind Changed: Stories, 2010, etc.) attempts to answer that question and more in this first full-length biography of Joseph Heller (1923–1999).
When Heller’s sprawling World War II picaresque was published in 1961, few predicted it would become a defining novel of the decade, let alone add a new word to the language or still be selling a half-century later. Daugherty has a natural feel for the texture of Heller's worlds, both physical and cultural: his impoverished Coney Island youth, the gung-ho patriotic fervor of World War II, the Beat Generation and the corporate culture of Madison Avenue, where Heller worked by day while toiling on his first novel by night. Daugherty is especially good at capturing the whirlwind events of Catch-22’s publication—a “literary Manhattan Project” whipped into shape by editor Robert Gottlieb (who advised shuffling chapters to get to the funny parts quicker) and packaged and sold by superstar agent Candida Donadio. The author also has a strong sense of the 1970s cultural malaise against which Something Happened (1974) was written, and how Good as Gold (1979) anticipated a more materialistic age. Eventually, Heller’s success led to philandering, a messy divorce and estranged children; a crippling bout with Guillain-Barré Syndrome and waning critical esteem only made things worse. Throughout this absorbing biography, Heller’s moods, affability, wit, seriousness and selfishness all shine through. Daugherty’s attention to the details of his divorce and diet become mundane, and he can get a little too chummy with “Joe” the writer. However, he also has a fine sense of what Heller was up against with Catch-22, as he tried to forge a fresh, irreverent outlook—absorbed from writers such as Jaroslav Hašek, Celine and Nabokov—on a war that had already been defined by James Jones and Norman Mailer. Also, Daugherty scores some strong critical insights regarding the author’s style—e.g., “Instinctually, Joe knew the relentless rhythms of Borscht Belt jokes were like the incantatory prayers one finds in Psalms: The transition from one to the other was natural, almost unnoticeable.”
Essential reading about a writer whose major novels continue to command attention.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-59685-9
Page Count: 560
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
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.
