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MOCKINGBIRD

A PORTRAIT OF HARPER LEE

Proof that the aging avian continues to elude and frustrate pursuers.

A determined but ultimately sketchy summary of the life of Lee, who shuns publicity and avoids biographers.

Nelle Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) remains one of the most frequently taught novels in American high schools, and its author remains an impossible bird to lime. For his efforts, which consumed several years, Shields (known principally for his YA titles) has come away with only a few feathers. Virtually all of this biography deals with the years leading up to Lee’s Mockingbird (childhood and college and law school) and with its immediate aftermath (the sales, the celebrity, the Pulitzer, the movie). Much of what the author provides for the ensuing 40 years are anecdote and rumor and reports of rare sightings. There are many pages about Lee’s collaboration with Truman Capote on In Cold Blood (confirming much of the detail in the film Capote), with some attention to Capote’s jealousy of Lee’s success and his petty failure to acknowledge the great contributions she made (Shields examined her capacious notes among Capote’s papers). Shields has read every piece published about Lee, every interview she granted (some he reproduces at length), but because Lee refused to cooperate (and told her friends to be silent), Shields cannot answer the most fundamental questions that readers and fans have: Why has Harper Lee never published another book? Has she been writing but just not publishing? Lee’s mind and heart likewise remain enigmatic. Lee’s Cerberus is her older sister Alice (now in her mid-90s), who said years ago that a burglar stole Lee’s nearly completed manuscript of her second novel (or, perhaps, a dog ate it). And Lee abandoned a true-crime book that she researched for years. Shields’s prose is generally unremarkable—sometimes silly (“The wind blew back her short chestnut hair...”) and clichéd.

Proof that the aging avian continues to elude and frustrate pursuers.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-8050-7919-X

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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

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