Again, as in Cruising Speed (1971), Buckley takes us day by day, sometimes hour by hour, through a week or so in his busy, busy life—in this case eight days from the fall of 1981. There is lots of National Review business, of course, including the consideration of an expensive lease renewal. ("I ponder the extraordinary hold on you that a property, and an area, can develop.") There are a couple of speeches to prepare and deliver, letters to answer, phone calls to parry. Buckley muses on his reasons for writing, for working hard: "Why do I do so much? I expect that the promptings issue from a subtle dialectical counterpoint. Of what? Well, the call of recta ratio, and the fear of boredom." (He then goes on, patronizingly, to explain what recta ratio means—and to consider the "appeal of generic Latin terms.") He reminisces—about a sailing trip with Ronald Reagan, Jr., about his prep school, about his brief CIA stint, about a column in which he mistakenly maligned Pat Boone. ("I was terribly grieved at the hurt I had done him," Buckley concludes, but his description of the incident is actually blithe, insensitive, and self-aggrandizing.) He tapes television's Firing Line, gets a phone call from "my old friend the commander-in-chief," sails with David Niven and publisher Sam Vaughan, heaps praise on assorted friends and family, plugs several of his books, goes to Mass, wrestles with a few current issues, carries on a number of little feuds. And some of this, perhaps, may engage those easily dazzled by name-droppings—or by little peeks into Life with the Buckleys. ("I completed my notes, and are the perfect chicken sandwich Gloria brought me, with a glass of cool white wine. Pat came in, en route to her lunch, and we discussed the weekend plans, and she told me now don't forget that my black tie and cummerbund were in the pocket of my tux, and I promised I'd remember, and walked down the stairs with her, saw her out, and dangled for a minute over the harpsichord.") But, while Buckley's self-congratulation can be marginally palatable when mixed with a story (as in Atlantic High or Airborne), here it's undiluted. So most readers will probably find this tedious at best, sleekly loathsome at worst—especially since, in contrast to the fairly stylish Cruising Speed, it's sloppily written (p. 169: "It was all great fun"; p. 171: "All this was great fun") and virtually without texture.
Pub Date: Aug. 12, 1983
ISBN: 0316114499
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
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.
